User:Chris15392001

INTERNATIONAL CHESS RATINGS DATABASE

International chess ratings for both males and females are available on the International Chess Federation (FIDE) site and are easy to download and further analyse statistically in Excel. Contrarily to many other related academic studies the findings below require no more tan a few hours analysis and an elementary knowledge of Excel.

ANALYSIS OF A RECENT DATABASE (April 2009)

The FIDE April 2009 database comprises the ratings for about 100,000 rated chess players from all parts of the world. Actually on 4 May 2009, the database had 99,761 valid data records which showed actual ratings for 92,159 for males and 7,602 for females. The average male rating was 2045 whereas the average female rating was 1958. The difference of 87 is significative at nearly any confidence level. The standard deviations were close to 200 for both males and females. Another important finding is the under-representation of females at upper levels. Whereas females represented 7.6% of the whole sample there was only 1 female in the top 100 chess players (1%), 21 females in the top 1,000 chess players (2.1% ), 133 females in the top 5,000 chess players (slightly less than 2.7%) and 295 within the top 10,000 chess players worldwide (sligthly less than 3.0%). Within the best 20,000 chess players worldwide there were 675 females or slightly less than 3.4% of the whole sample. EFFECT OF FEMALE PARTICIPATION RATES

The FIDE database is broken down by countries and permits accordingly a further analysis in countries where female chess proportion is significantly higher than the overall proportion of 7.6%.The analysis of the top ranked 5% and top ranked 1% FIDE rated chess players in such countries is set out in the table below

The table shows that none of the countries surveyed (with the exception of China) show a lower gender gap than the overall world figure for the top 5% rated chess players (64%). Also none of the countries surveyed show a lower gender gap than the overall world figure for the top 1% rated chess players (72%). The implication is that increased female participation rates with respect to the overall worldwide female participation rate of 7.6% have generally no corrective effect on female under-representation at talended or elite levels in chess.

SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND COMPARISON WITH OTHER STUDY FINDINGS

The analysis of the FIDE April 2009 chess ratings database provides an easy and staightforward quantification of the average gender gap in chess ratings as well as of the growing under-representation of females as chess performance levels increase. In addition the data broken down by country suggest that higher female participation rates generally have no corrective effect on the dearth of talented or elite female chess players. Assuming top chess performance demands exceptional mental skills the dearth of female representation at top or elite chess levels in the FIDE database may be consisent with related findings regarding gender distribution of top mental skills (refs 2,3). The finding that female under-representation at top chess levels is not affected by female participation rates is in line with the resuls of a study by Howard (ref 4). It should be mentioned however that the results derived by this straightforward analysis of the FIDE database are at variance with the findings of other recent studies (refs 5&6).

ref 1 : http://ratings.fide.com/download.phtml ref 2 : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_and_intelligence

ref 3 : http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/269/5220/41

ref 4 : http://www.abc.net.au/science/news/stories/s1376865.htm

ref 5 : http://eprints.ma.man.ac.uk/1225/01/covered/MIMS_ep2009_13.pdf

ref 6 : http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2007/01/participation_explains_differe.php