It is hypothesised that the reason behind this is because chess is a boys’ club, so to speak, and thus there is not a lot of representation.
Absence of representation means that it may seem that you are the only one doing XYZ, which in and of its own can be terrifying because we often feel that the odds are stacked against us (which is a self-fulfilling prophecy), or that we are held to much higher standards than others.
Personally, I enjoy seeing diverse representation even if I am not represented. I want people to not be afraid to pursue their dreams and goals, I don’t want implicit prejudices due to lack of representation either.
With almost all sports males have a dramatic physical advantage[1] so it's not really fair to have males compete with females.
With chess there is no physical advantage, so why keep separate tournaments for males and females? What is the reasoning for preventing males and females competing in chess?
[1] In the 90s, ISTR reading about a tennis match between a #3-rank female player against a #5000-something-ranked male, and the male player simply dominated. I wish I could find that article now, but it was a print mag and I don't remember which one it was.
They are both making claims. (And I think usually most people are making some sort of claim, unless they are just nitpicking). One is claiming that they remember a study — pretty vague, and easily proven (as far as we can tell at least) by just showing us any study. The other is claiming that that study doesn’t replicate… without having seen it, which seems like a pretty high bar to clear.
[1] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ejsp.440
[2] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620924051
[3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797617736887
The study. Note that this is about taking equally matched players, and having them compete via the Internet without knowing the sex of their partner, then again knowing the sex.
In addition to the other studies published by Wiley, I have two more:
Why is GP flagged but parent isn’t?
Parent adds nothing to the conversation, but apparently GP was worth removing even though it is now supported by 3 different sources.
My guess is that it's due to how expectations affect how likely we are to enter flow state. If we subconsciously expect ourselves to enter a challenge in less than good/fair/even conditions we might be less likely to engage fully because we're using our attention for questioning ourselves/the situation.
Att least that's how I feel I myself work.
And a related meta study that looks at sports in general: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S146902921...