Chess

Like the sciences, the game of chess is one area proposed as an example of how there are "more men at the top" -- a distribution which has been suggested to indicate greater variation among men than among women in innate ability (e.g. Howard, 2005). Bilalić et al (2008) argue that base participation rates in chess and the sciences explain the disproportionate representation of men at the top, leaving "little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for." (see PhysOrg.com, 2009 for more detail on Bilalić et al's findings). This is hardly the first time participation rates have been implicated: Charness and Gerchak (1996) posited a log-linear model which not only predicted the distribution of women at the top levels of chess, but also the dominance of Russians, based on participation rates. Charness et al (2005) later found that solitary study was the greatest predictor of chess achievement, demonstrating that grandmasters spent nearly five times as long practicing chess in their first decade as intermediate-level players.

---

I hate to drag out this word, since I believe the definition to be meaningless, but here goes: multitasking. Women seem to divide up their resources (time, money and energy) differently than men. When we talked about charitable giving (10/1/08), women were more likely to give small amounts to several charities than a large sum to one. In several discussions of work-life balance, it's seemed likely that women were less likely to give priority to a single aspect of their lives. So, is it terribly unlikely that when men and women participate in chess, women are more likely to have additional demands on their time, and spend less time in solitary study? I don't think so. I'd like to spend more time discussing how men and women make priorities in their lives. But with everything I've got going on, I just don't have the time. ;)

---

Find out the day's topic before you read: follow diffblog on Twitter! Diffblog also available on LiveJournal. Delay between actual post and LJ-syndication varies, but seems to be around 5-6 hours, although yesterday (1/13/08) it took 24 hours.