The Chess World’s Gender Problem
The 2018 Candidates Tournament in Berlin is on a rest day today. Round 10 kicks off tomorrow, putting the eight potential challengers for Magnus Carlsen’s title into the home stretch.
While the chess world takes a breather, I wrote a piece over at The Victory Press on gender politics at the highest levels of the sport. All getting at a pernicious question: will a woman ever have a meaningful shot at the world championship?
From my article:
With chess, billed as a “sport of the mind,” the old arguments about physiological differences that supposedly make it impossible for men and women to compete on equitable terms should fall away. And indeed, this was part of the rationale for the decision to finally open chess competitions up to women on the international level roughly 30 years ago. Women still have their own tournament circuits and their own separate rating systems and their own titles, but female competitors have the choice to throw down with men. Hungarian grandmaster Judit Polgár famously refused to compete in women’s tournaments or claim women’s titles, saying that “… women should have the self-confidence that they are as good as male players, but only if they are willing to work and take it seriously as much as male players.”
And yet, somehow, women are still being systematically held down and excluded from the highest levels of the game.
One need only look at the current Candidates Tournament being held this month in Berlin. Eight of the strongest players in the world are vying for the right to challenge reigning champion Magnus Carlsen for the World Championship in November in London. All eight are men.
Indeed, if you look back through the history of the World Championship, you’ll note that women are conspicuously absent from the conversation. Only one woman has ever come close to challenging for the world title — Polgár, who competed for the FIDE World Championship in 2005 but posted a disappointing performance and finished last out of eight. (Veselin Topalov went on to win, and the next year the two major world chess championship titles were unified in an historic clash between Topalov and Vladimir Kramnik, who is currently competing in Berlin to regain his title.)
To get to the World Championship involves playing and winning in other, smaller tournaments — but these tournaments are often invitationals. Surprise, surprise: women don’t seem to get invited.
In some sense, opening competitive chess to allow men and women to compete together has served to hold women back. The people who were most committed to keeping women out did not lose any political power when the gender barrier was broken, and now they can claim a degree of plausible deniability when inequality rears its head.
