Shouldn't the work of incentivising more women be outside of the tournament and not bend the tournament altogether?
judging by the response I assume "positive discrimination" ain't mainstream anymore in the US
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup" talks about how people more fiercely reject a group very similar to their own, yet slightly different, more than they reject groups that are actually very different.
It leads to stupid gatekeeping like "treat the male chess players better than the female ones" and small nudges will never overcome it.
If women feel put off by chess unless they have their own tournaments, then they can have their own tournaments. It literally hurts nobody.
If you want to have a chess game against women, I'm sure you can do so. They aren't stopping you from playing them.
They're just stopping you from playing in the tournament they created because others were toxic to them in the existing ones.
then they can have their own tournaments - of course, no one should actively stop them. I am more concerned that an organization managing the tournament decides to create a new category rather then putting in the effort to bring everyone to the same playing field. I mean is that not the decades long battle that made it all the way to the workplace? Should we also create female software engineering roles, and female CEO roles bc the CEO market is crowded by tech bros? If you have $1B, and you have to solve this problem, how do you split it, that's my question.
I think it’s more likely that people often don’t like being in a noticeable out group, and that females experience that more negatively than males, so they skip it.
No need to blame anyone, and it doesn’t deny the attempt to help females participate.
I'm not convinced that this is completely true.
The fact that there is a category reserved for women when there is no technical reason for such separation in that activity could make girls assume that women are somehow less proficient at that activity and other similar activities. That could discourage the best of them from even engaging in that activity or similar activities.
In some activities, such as power lifting, it's pretty obvious that such separation is essential as women would rarely, if ever, win at the most levels of competition in almost any age group (I don't know if this is true, for example, in the 1-3 month old category!). In these cases offering separation encourages participation.
In this particular case, who cares?! It's speedcubing and likely this girl will lose interest in the activity soon and move onto something else (or, more likely, I suspect her parents will push her into something else and drill her on that for a couple years).
on the other hand, in this young age physical development between boys and girls can be very different. so maybe separation is necessary because of that.
Any kind of treatment that doesn't follow the law of jungle is discrimination. We need to think which one of them are better for our societal outcomes as a whole.
Women "trail behind" men in things like speedcubing, e-sports and so on, and I've always felt that it's simply because they've got better things to do with their time.
Feeling is no substitute for thinking, no matter how much applause this sort of statement will get you from the fairer sex.
Specially in contest competitions.
There are arguments that it promotes equality, that it’s more fair… but I think the reality is closer to “it would be embarrassing for a man to be beaten by a woman”.
But it's a fair assumption considering how Kasparov treated Polgar.
The reality is simply that women would not stand a chance, with unbelievably few exceptions (and even they wouldn't have much of a chance). Do you also think that we have women's sports because it would be embarrassing for men to be beaten by a woman?
As with football, basketball, and other pursuits, in chess there are 13 year old boys who will beat the top women. Although in chess they're fractionally harder to find.
So no, it's not because men would be embarrassed that we have women's sports. It's so women (whose highest achievers probably would not rank in the top 100 million people on the planet if all men were offered the same opportunity to compete at such a low level for the money) can have a chance to win something.
* Equestrian endurance racing: https://www.fei.org/endurance/rankings
* Long-distance sled-dog racing: https://iditarod.com/race/2023/
* NHRA drag racing: https://www.nhra.com/news/2023/final-2023-camping-world-drag...
* Crossword solving: https://crosswordtournament.com/2018/index.htm
* Dog agility: https://www.agilitynow.eu/results/agility-world-championship...
I read that the reason so many fields appear to be male-dominated is just that men have wider variance on almost anything you can measure, so outliers on any metric are more likely to be men.
https://www.fitnessfirst.com.au/get-there/new-study-finds-wo...
Still, when I ask Google to provide a list of top 10 ultra endurance runners in terms of absolute performance across sexes, it lists not a single woman and elaborates: "While female athletes like Courtney Dauwalter have occasionally won mid-tier ultramarathons outright over the entire field, in highly competitive, top-tier international events, the absolute raw times and physical performance indexes lean heavily toward the elite male field."
Why are changing the criteria?
Here are a list of race results you can look through.[0]
Look at the longest distance & time races such as the multi day one and females are "in the top 10, consistently", in overall results.
And thats with currently only about 20% of ultra endurance runners are female -- but growing. Apparently the science has female physiology as potentially superior for the longer distances (>195 miles) and studies[1] show that they are faster in amateur pace per mile at the greater distances
Chess has a whole separate WxM category so while if they're really good at chess they can become a real GM, but there's also an easier category called WGM (Woman Grandmaster). Same for IM, FM, and CM - they're just as open to women as to men, but they still have easier equivalents called WIM, WFM, and WCM.
Sound about as useful as splitting rubik's cube champion by weight class.
Video looks impressive, though the resources poured into that training seems excessive to me. Maybe I'm too poor and don't understand how rich people raise their kids?