MARK RUBERY CHESS

Today the popular English grandmaster, Nigel Short turns 58. This often controversial but always interesting player provoked a media storm a while back when his views of women and chess made the headlines of major newspapers across the world. An article that he wrote in the magazine ‘New in Chess’ was picked up some weeks after publication and instantly went viral after it appeared he had incurred the wrath of the female chess community by claiming men are “hardwired” to be better at the game than women.

The paragraph that caused the stir was the following:

‘Men and women’s brains are hard-wired very differently, so why should they function in the same way? I don’t have the slightest problem in acknowledging that my wife possesses a much higher degree of emotional intelligence than I do. Likewise, she doesn’t feel embarrassed in asking me to manoeuvre the car out of our narrow garage. One is not better than the other, we just have different skills. It would be wonderful to see more girls playing chess, and at a higher level, but rather than fretting about inequality, perhaps we should just gracefully accept it as a fact.’

Short soon found himself on the defensive and appeared on Sky News to set the record straight against some of the more emotional ‘tabloid-like’ accusations against him.

Here are a handful of reactions of what quickly became a ‘gender debate’ from the Chessbase site:

The common presumption in the Western world is that women are no good at maths as their brains are wired differently - surprisingly then that in Asia women outperform men at maths and Asian maths standards are higher...nature or nurture? (Sarah De Lisle)

I think a lot of this emphasis - that women are not obsessive and are living life more fully could translate to “women are like butterflies. They flit hither with no real interest in one topic due to their scatterbrained minds.” (Louise Scarlett Sinclair)

Men and women are different, sure, but the manifestation in elite chess is based on hyper-competitiveness from upbringing and testosterone and the proto-autistic obsessiveness that males demonstrate 30 to 1 over women. Eventually more women lack the incentives and the desire/ability to care about and study and play chess enough to get to GM-level, not the cognitive capacity to play chess very well. (Mig Greengard)

Yet another classic example of a knee-jerk reaction from the media. No one could have expected such a huge response but Nigel Short, admit it, I bet you are loving all of it. (Kevin Goh Wei Ming)

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