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PARTICIPATION RATES AND THE DIFFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE OF WOMEN AND MEN IN CHESS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 March 2007

MERIM BILALIĆ  and
PETER MCLEOD
MERIM BILALIĆ
Affiliation:
School of Social Sciences and Law, Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
PETER MCLEOD
Affiliation:
Department of Experimental Psychology, Oxford University, Oxford, UK
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Summary

The superiority of men over women in chess has been cited as evidence that there are fundamental differences in male and female intelligence (Howard, 2005a, 2006; Irwing & Lynn, 2005). An alternative interpretation of the difference is that it is due to differential male and female participation rates in chess (Charness & Gerchak, 1996; Bilalić & McLeod, 2006; Chabris & Glickman, in press). This has been dismissed by Howard (2006) on the grounds that changes in the difference in skill level between top male and female players in recent years are not correlated with changing relative participation rates. Here it is shown that Howard’s analysis is misleading. The data are consistent with differential participation rates as the explanation of the gap between the performance of women and men in chess.

Type
Short Report
Information
Journal of Biosocial Science , Volume 39 , Issue 5 , September 2007 , pp. 789 - 793
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2007

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