a role of gender in intellectual sports.pdf

European Journal of Social Psychology

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)

Published online 14 May 2007 in Wiley InterScience

(www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/ejsp.440

Checkmate? The role of gender stereotypes in the ultimate

intellectual sport

ANNE MAASS * , CLAUDIO D’ETTOLE

AND MARA CADINU

University of Padova, Italy

Abstract

Women are surprisingly underrepresented in the chess world, representing less that 5% of registered

tournament players worldwide and only 1% of the world’s grand masters. In this paper it is argued that

gender stereotypes are mainly responsible for the underperformance of women in chess. Forty-two

male–female pairs, matched for ability, played two chess games via Internet. When players were

unaware of the sex of opponent (control condition), females played approximately as well as males.

When the gender stereotype was activated (experimental condition), women showed a drastic

performance drop, but only when they were aware that they were playing against a male opponent.

When they (falsely) believed to be playing against a woman, they performed as well as their male

opponents. In addition, our ﬁndings suggest that women show lower chess-speciﬁc self-esteem and a

weaker promotion focus, which are predictive of poorer chess performance. Copyright # 2007 John

Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Chess is not only one of the oldest games but it is also, by many, considered the ultimate intellectual

sport. Although chess is an intellectual pursuit not requiring physical strength, women are generally

considered inferior and they represent less than 5% of registered tournament players worldwide.

Currently, the best female player, Judit Polgar, is placed in position 17 of the FIDE ranking (Federation

Internationale des Echecs, 2006) and she is also the only woman among the top 100 players of the

world. Thus, women seem to be underrepresented as well as underperforming. 1

Why should this be the case? A ﬁrst step to understand gender differences in chess is to ask what

characteristics are predictive of success and whether these characteristics are less common in females. We will

only consider general cognitive and motivational factors here and ignore the speciﬁc tactical and strategic

skills that develop as a function of chess training, including the striking ability of expert chess players to

quickly capture the gist of highly complex chess positions (de Groot & Gobet, 1996; Ross, 2006).

*Correspondence to: Dr Anne Maass, DPSS, Universit` di Padova, Via Venezia, 8, 35139 Padova, Italy.

E-mail: anne.maass@unipd.it

1 However, Charness and Gerchak (1996) have argued that women’s underrepresentation among top ranks is simply a function of

relative participation rates, since extreme scores tend to increase disproportionally as population size increases.

Received 11 November 2006

Accepted 2 April 2007

232

Anne Maass et al.

The single most important key to success appears to be effort and engagement. According to

Charness, Tufﬁesh, Krampe, Reingold, and Vasyukova (2005), chess skill is best predicted by the

number of hours a player allocates to deliberate practice, followed by number of hours of tournament

play, and years of private instruction. It has been hypothesized that women may be less willing to

devote their time mono-thematically to chess, leading to higher drop-out rates. However, this

hypothesis has not found any support in a recent study conducted by Chabris and Glickman (2006) in

the United States who have found equal drop-out rates in matched samples of males and females.

The second factor believed to play a major role in chess is memory. Chess players need to recall an

impressive amount of theoretical knowledge from long-term memory, including a great number of

openings, although they may not excel in mnemonic abilities outside of this speciﬁc domain. Less

intuitive is the central role of working memory, including spatial-visual memory. Note that chess

players have to calculate a great number of potential moves which implies an impressive

working-memory capacity considering that positions of multiple pieces have to be memorized over a

series of consecutive (imaginary) moves. Thus, memory for location is crucial in forward analysis.

Indeed, expert chess players have a remarkable capacity to memorize positions (De Groot, 1965),

although this memory advantage may be eliminated when chess positions are random and, hence, do

not conform to intelligible schemes (e.g. Simon & Chase, 1973; Saariluoma, 1989; but see Gobet &

Simon, 1996; Van der Maas & Wagenmakers, 2005). Are there reasons to expect that women are

disadvantaged in terms of their mnemonic abilities? The literature argues against this hypothesis

showing either no sex differences or better performance in women on memory tests in general (Jensen,

1998; Stumpf & Jackson, 1994; for an overview see Halpern & LaMay, 2000) and on memory for

spatial location in particular (Eals & Silverman, 1994). Thus, memory—although heavily implicated

in chess performance—is an unlikely candidate when trying to explain sex differences.

A third ability that appears critical in chess performance is mental imagery. Chess players seem to

rely heavily on imagery and this capacity becomes decisive in ‘blindfold’ chess (Chabris & Hearst,

2003). Some authors even argue that players will be unable to ever reach top ranks, unless they have

sufﬁcient imagery ability (Howard, 2005). Interestingly, visual-spatial imaging is also one of the few

facets of intelligence, where sex differences have emerged consistently, with females being at a clear

disadvantage (for an overview see Halpern & LaMay, 2000). Among the spatial imaging tasks, two

appear particularly relevant to chess, namely the generation and maintenance of spatial images and

mental rotation, with gender gaps being particularly large on the latter (Voyer, Voyer, & Bryden, 1995).

Mental rotation is crucial in chess because the board is rotated depending on the assigned color of

pieces, black or white. For instance, a piece positioned in c6 will appear to the upper left or lower right,

depending on the player’s color, whereas chess books and magazines represent the board always from

the position of the person playing white. Thus, mental imagery in chess necessarily involves some form

of mental rotation. Considering the existence of pervasive gender differences, mental rotation appears a

promising candidate for explaining the poorer chess performance of women.

Fourth, motivational factors such as aggressiveness may contribute to chess performance. Chess is a

highly competitive activity, as evidenced by the war-like vocabulary used in periodicals and books in

which terms like battle, defeat, victory, attack, defense, destroy, etc. appear with high frequency.

Considering that women generally score lower than men both on aggressiveness and dominance

(Bettencourt & Miller, 1996), it is plausible to assume that women encounter a disadvantage in chess.

As the English grandmaster Nigel Short stated, women ‘just don’t have the killer instinct.’ The

importance of motivational factors in chess has been demonstrated by Van der Maas and Wagenmakers

(2005) who identiﬁed four major factors contributing to chess performance: general chess ability

(tactical, positional as well as endgame knowledge), chess-speciﬁc verbal knowledge (opening-,

middle-, endgame knowledge and imagery), memory (recall for positions), and motivation (including

fear of failure and desire to win). Two ﬁndings are particularly relevant for the aims of the present study.

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

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First, general ability, knowledge, and memory emerged as the best predictors of chess ability, but

motivation—although less predictive—contributed above and beyond these factors. Second, Van der

Maas and Wagenmakers (2005, p. 50) found that women ‘had lower Elo ratings than would be expected

on the basis of their test scores’. 2 Since Elo ratings are earned in tournaments, this suggests that women

encounter difﬁculties in competitive game situations that prevent them from performing at the level of

their actual capacities.

This suggests yet another explanation of the underperformance of women in chess, namely gender

stereotyping. The difﬁculty encountered by female chess players may mainly reside in their awareness

that others expect them to perform poorly in a predominantly male domain. Not only are females often

accused of inferior (‘girl’s’) play but, when they perform exceptionally well, their femininity is also

often doubted (Shahade, 2005). Although we are not aware of any systematic investigation of

chess-related gender stereotypes, such stereotypes are easily visible in chess magazines and have been

discussed in detail in Shahade’s (2005) popular book. Applying the stereotype threat model (Steele &

Aronson, 1995; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999), the activation of gender stereotypes during a

tournament is likely to interfere with the chess performance of women, presumably due to their

preoccupation to conﬁrm negative expectations. The stereotype threat model has received considerable

empirical support both in academic domains (Inzlicht & Good, 2006; Maass & Cadinu, 2003; Steele,

Spencer, & Aronson, 2002) and sports (Stone, Lynch, Sjomeling, & Darley, 1999; for a review see

Beilock & McConnell, 2004), but, to our knowledge, has never been investigated as a potential

explanation of the gender gap in chess.

From a stereotype threat perspective, the investigation of chess appears interesting for a number of

reasons. In the past, stereotype threat has been investigated in two broad domains, namely intellectual

(e.g., math) and athletic activities (e.g., golf). Stereotype-related performance declines have been found

in both domains, although distinct mechanisms seem to be implicated. Whereas performance declines

in the academic domain are often attributable to thought intrusions and to a reduction of

working-memory capacities (e.g., Cadinu, Maass, Rosabianca, & Kiesner, 2005; Schmader & Johns,

2003), sport performance seems to decline under stereotype activation because conscious attention is

directed to motor processes that are usually performed in an automatic fashion (Beilock &McConnell,

2004). Chess and other competitive games (such as go or bridge) are located at the intersection between

the academic and the sports domain, as they combine the intellectual demands of the former with the

competitive nature of the latter. As a consequence, and different from physical sports, chess players

may be particularly susceptible to stereotype threat, considering that chess requires a remarkable

working-memory capacity that is already pushed to the limits by the competitive nature of the situation.

However, there is an additional process through which stereotypes may affect quality of play, namely

by making women less assertive and reducing the likelihood that they will play aggressively. One of the

aims of the present study was to investigate this possibility.

From the perspective of gender stereotyping, chess also constitutes an interesting realm of inquiry

for two additional reasons. First, it is one of the few sports in which men and women enter in direct

competition. Second, chess tournaments satisfy a crucial precondition of stereotype threat, namely

category salience, considering that women represent a miniscule percentage of players in practically all

mixed-sex chess tournaments. Such minority or token status is known to produce performance deﬁcits,

decreased well-being, and a reduction of self-conﬁdence (Inzlicht & Ben-Zeev, 2000; Inzlicht & Good,

2006). As the female chess champion of the U.S., Jennifer Shahade (2005, p. 6), states: ‘the category of

women’s chess does not refer to some intrinsically female way of playing chess but rather to being a

minority in the chess world, which can affect the way a woman plays’. Interestingly, in line with this

2 The Elo rating system allows to reliably calculate the strength of each player based on their past performance in tournaments,

taking into account the strength of their opponents.

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

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Anne Maass et al.

idea, Chabris and Glickman (2006) have recently shown that girls have lower chess ratings than boys

when entering competitions only in locales in which they are numerically underrepresented among the

chess population.

AIMS OF THE PRESENT STUDY

The present study pursued four aims. The ﬁrst and most important aim was to investigate the potential role

of stereotype activation in chess performance of female players. In the control condition, the gender salience

was reduced by having participants play through the Internet under false (gender-neutral) names. Players

were unaware of the gender of their opponent and at no time during the experiment was there any reference

to gender. In the experimental condition, we ﬁrst activated the stereotype that females are poor chess players

and then had males and females play two games against each other, but, critically, participants believed to

play against a same-sex opponent in one game and against an opposite-sex opponent in the other. This

allowed us to assess performance as a function of the presumed sex of the opponent, while keeping the

actual (opposite-sex) opponent constant.

We predicted that women would perform close to chance level in the control condition. We expected

the same in the experimental condition as long as females (falsely) believed that they were playing

against another woman, because, in this case, gender stereotypes would be irrelevant. A below chance

performance was only hypothesized in the condition in which the stereotype was activated and women

were aware that they were playing against a man, presumably the condition that most closely resembles

face-to-face tournaments in which gender is highly salient and women have an extremely high chance

to be playing against a male opponent.

A second aim was to investigate whether women who were reminded of the stereotype and were

aware that they were playing against a male opponent, would approach the game more defensively than

those that believed that they were playing against another woman.

Third, if women are chronically exposed to chess-related gender stereotypes, as suggested by

Shahade (2005), they may become less conﬁdent in their chess abilities (Inzlicht & Good, 2006) and

generally approach games with a more cautious regulatory focus, trying to limit the likelihood of failure

(prevention) rather than to maximize their gains (promotion; see Higgins, 1999). We therefore also

assessed participants’ chess-speciﬁc self-esteem as well as their promotion versus prevention-oriented

regulatory focus, again, referring speciﬁcally to the way in which they approach chess competitions.

Higgins (1999) distinguishes two motivational systems, one sensitive to gains (promotion), the other to

losses (prevention). Although Higgins refers to two broad systems of goal pursuit that affect many

facets of people’s life, the aspect that is most relevant to the current study is how promotion versus

prevention-oriented individuals approach achievement situations. Whereas promotion-orientated

individuals strive to obtain positive outcomes (gains), prevention-oriented individuals are mainly

concerned with avoiding negative outcomes (losses) and therefore are likely to approach competitive

situations such as chess games with a more cautious, vigilant attitude. Considering the long history of

stigmatization in the chess world, it is therefore reasonable to suspect that female players approach

chess competitions with a more cautious prevention mindset, which may well hamper their

performance and, in the long run, damage their chess careers.

Finally, we also assessed two spatial abilities that are potentially relevant in chess regardless of

experimental condition, namely mental rotation and memory for location. Mental rotation not only

represents a basic skill that is likely to be relevant in chess, but it is also a potential candidate for

explaining gender differences in chess, considering that males reliably outperform females. Memory for

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

Women and chess

235

location, although generally unrelated to gender, was included in this study because it appears

particularly relevant in forward calculations and, to our knowledge, has not been investigated in the past.

METHOD

Pilot Study Investigating Chess-Related Gender Stereotypes

Prior to the main study, we tested whether chess players do indeed perceive women as less capable in

chess, an issue frequently cited (Shahade, 2005), but—to our knowledge—not investigated

systematically in the past. A sample of 22 registered chess players, including 12 males and 10 females,

aged 17 to 61 (mean age ¼ 37.5) were asked to indicate both their personal beliefs (stereotype

endorsement: In your opinion, on the average who is better at playing chess, men or women? In your

opinion, who is more gifted for chess, men or women?) and their perception of beliefs among chess

players (stereotype awareness: Regardless of your own opinion, what is the opinion among chess

players? In general, do chess players believe that men or women are better at playing chess? In

general, whom do chess players consider more gifted for chess, men or women?). Participants

responded on 7-point scales from 1 (clearly males better or more gifted)to7(clearly females better or

more gifted), with 4 representing the neutral scale midpoint (equal).

As far as participant’s personal endorsement of gender stereotypes is concerned, males were

considered much better at chess (M ¼ 2.27) and much more gifted (M ¼ 2.59), with both means clearly

below the neutral scale midpoint of 4, one sample t(21) ¼ 7.23, p < .001, and one sample t(21) ¼

6.56, p < .001.

Ratings were even more extreme when considering the participants’ awareness concerning socially

shared stereotypes. Respondents agreed that other chess players consider males better at chess

(M ¼ 1.80) and more gifted (M ¼ 1.63), with both means, again, clearly below the neutral scale

midpoint of 4, one sample t(21) ¼ 10.68, p < .001, and one sample t(21) ¼ 11.63, p < .001.

Interestingly, no differences between male and female respondents emerged for any of the four

items, suggesting that chess-related gender stereotypes are widely shared and by no means conﬁned to

male players. Stereotype awareness, a critical condition for stereotype threat to occur, did not vary with

age, r(22) ¼ .02, n.s., whereas personal stereotype endorsement tended to decrease the younger the

respondents were, r(22) ¼ .42, p < .05 (considering the average between the two endorsement and the

two awareness scores, respectively).

This small-scale pilot study suggests that gender stereotyes are very pronounced in the chess world

and that both male and females players are perfectly aware of these stereotypes. 3

Participants of Main Study

Forty-two male and 42 female chess players volunteered to participate via Internet in this study (mean

age 33.54). They were contacted at tournaments, through the Italian Chess Federation, and through

local chess clubs throughout the entire national territory. Each dyad was composed of a male and a

3 These ﬁndings are in line with those recently obtained by Luciana Carraro [personal communication] on non-chess players.

Carraro asked a sample of Italian students (age 21–22) not involved in chess whether they considered chess (together with a list of

other sports) a typically masculine or feminine activity. On a scale from 9 (typically masculine activity) to þ 9 (typically

feminine activity), chess was rated more typical of males, M ¼ 2.46, a value that differed from the neutral point of zero,

t(17) ¼ 3.56, p < .01.

Eur. J. Soc. Psychol. 38, 231–245 (2008)

DOI: 10.1002/ejsp

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