In the September of 2005, Judit Polgar was 29. It is an empirically derived fact that most of the athletes have their best years between 26-32. Judit was at her peak. She was about to play the World Championship tournament. Let me reiterate. The World Championship. Not the women's world championship. She had qualified because of her exceptionally high rating performance over the last couple of years, despite taking time off from chess to give birth to her eldest son, Oliver. No woman had ever reached this point till then, and still has not. With the heavy weight of expectations on her shoulders, she entered the tournament in the San Luis province of Argentina. With all eyes on this historic event, the 'I-will-scare-the-shit-out-of-you' Judit simply failed to arrive and finished last. Hope of centuries for thousands of female chess players slowly dwindled away. Like the queen on the chess board which dominates the game when unleashed on the opponent, some had hoped of putting the queen on the throne in the real world. Some murmured either openly or privately that this is exactly what was expected. A woman playing against men at the world championship? What else did you expect? Some were optimistic, that this was probably just the dawn of women in chess and they will rise to unimaginable new heights in the new millennium. Judit tried once more in 2007, but by then she was definitely past her peak. Either with smirking chauvinism or mad hope, the world moved on. Oh, but I don't want to move on. What happened to women's chess after Judit? Why is Judit just a memory and not a pioneer in the continuing list of dominant female players in chess giving everyone a run for their money. Or let me rephrase it so you will get more frustrated. How can there be so few women at the top in the world of professional chess, a game that requires nothing but your brain? This is the final part about the systemic bias in our society against women in sports, where it comes from and what can we do about it. But it would be absolute injustice to talk about any of it, before I tell you about Judit, her sister Susan and their roaring rise that broke patriarchy, one move at a time.
László Polgár was a young educational psychologist living in Budapest. He read 400 biographies of intellectuals ranging from Socrates to Einstein by the age of 19. He got consumed by the idea that 'geniuses are made, not born'. He did not buy into any of the debate surrounding 'nature vs. nurture'. He was convinced that if started at a very young age, early and intensive specialization in a particular subject is all you need to make a kid a superstar. All he needed was a woman ready to participate in this experiment, with her own progenies. He found that in Klara and they married soon. They had 3 daughters, Susan, Sofia and Judit. They homeschooled all of them and taught them variety of things ranging from foreign languages to Mathematics. But finally, Chess was chosen as the chisel for their young minds and intense chess training began at the age of 4 for the eldest Susan and eventually Sofia and Judit followed. His critics called him a monster, Dr. Frankenstein for experimenting with his own kids to prove his own wild theories. But his wife and him believed it in their hearts and they just drilled on.
What followed is nothing short than a plot of a feature film that is begging to be made (this documentary comes close). We are not going to go into the details (as always. I usually won't care but I don't want to lose you to a TikTok of a teenager setting dumpsters on fire), but all three girls responded in the exact same way Laszlo and Klara wanted. Susan became the top ranked female player in the world at the age of 15. Susan and Laszlo had to fight bureaucracy, anti-semitic attacks and countless middle-aged men who were terrified at the thought of a young girl being better than them. They gave in, thinking this is just a mad man and his daughter, a one-off case. Chess clubs in Budapest will go back to being filled with smoke from the pipes of men. And then, Judit arrived.
Anyone who watched Judit play instantly knew she was special. An exceptional attacking player who shot down giants like the former world champions Borris Spasky and Anatoly Karpov in her teens. There was no question that she will be the women's world champion, but there were already predictions of her being a world championship contender. Judit breathed, ate and slept chess. There is no dearth of anecdotes about her brilliancy. One of her famous quotes from her early teenage was, "These other girls are not serious about chess...I practice five or six hours a day, but they get distracted by cooking and work around the house." Remember this. We will come back to this quote.
A quick aside about how rating in chess works. Chess uses Elo rating to rank it's players. The way it works is slightly complicated but briefly, higher the rating, the better the player you are. Your rating increases by more points if you beat an opponent of higher rating than if you beat a lower rated player. To establish the perspective, the current World Champion, Magnus Carlsen has a rating of 2882, highest ever achieved by any human player. If I beat him, I get 40 points and he is docked the same number. But if I beat my grandpa, I get next to nothing. Hence, it is important here to register that to have a higher rating, you should keep beating higher ranked players and not lose or draw against lower ranked players.
Now let's quickly look at Judit in numbers. In 1991, she was awarded the title of Grandmaster, the youngest at that time. She was world #1 female player for 26 years. She is the only woman to have won a game against a reigning world number one player, and has defeated 11 current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess. And then her rating speaks for itself.
But this is not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about what happened after this. In the last few years, Judit and Susan talked extensively about a Catch-22, a helpless situation. A chicken-and-egg problem -
"There are still fewer women in competitive chess. It remains very hard for a woman to make a living as a professional chess player. My sister Judit and I are an exception. Therefore, it is a Catch-22. If it is hard to make a living in chess for women, few will be interested to pursue chess at the highest level. And if there are fewer women players who can successfully compete with men in the same level, there will be less interest in women’s chess." -Susan Polgar in 2013 right before the Anand-Carlsen World Championship match
She goes on to talk about it again, couple of years later.
"It’s a catch-22 of sorts, without certain rank you can’t compete at a certain level, and you can’t improve your rank unless you’re allowed to compete at that level. It’s a question of opportunity." - Susan Polgar in 2015 at an annual chess championship organized by her foundation St. Louis.
And then, again.
"There are fewer female coaches than male coaches, which poses a specific type of barrier. There’s a question of developing a bond with your coach, which can be hindered by traditional male communication styles. Till more women enter coaching, there won't be more girls playing the game and till more girls play the game, there won't be enough women at the top."
Isn't that what the struggle of empowerment, the fight against privilege all about? Till I don't have a job, I won't have the work experience. And till I don't have the work experience, I won't get the job. The infinite loop of never being able to escape the lack of privilege. Here is where I want to bring you back to the Judit quote-
"These other girls are not serious about chess...I practice five or six hours a day, but they get distracted by cooking and work around the house."
Susan goes on to say that she thinks fewer girls are taught the game much less encouraged to pursue it professionally. And you will be damned to know the margin by which she is right.
Why am I making such a big deal out of this? Because there are people like Nigel Short in 2020, former world #3, who think women are just not good enough. He thinks men are “hardwired” to be better at the game than women. Just in case you are thinking, the correct response to this statement is F#$& NO. In a paper published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society titled, 'Why are (the best) women so good at chess? Participation rates and gender differences in intellectual domains", the authors statistically prove that the under-representation of women at the top end in chess is almost exactly what would be expected, given the much greater number of men that participate in the game at all. Although they are careful to mention about the self-selection bias, it is worth noting that the decision to enrol in chess coaching is that of the parents'.
That is what the crux of the issue is. Polgar says the gender gap in chess is really a product of base-level gender socialization. She says chess is often treated like toy cars. And she is right. Boys are taught to play with toy cars and the chess board, girls with dolls. This mentality is exercised in multiple ways from a very young age going forward. The issue dominates the conversation surrounding 'Women in STEM'. A long term study like the one conducted by Dr. Hyde with around 3 million participants, concluded that biology cannot explain the vast differences between the skills and hence the researchers concluded that early experience, educational policies and culture strongly affect success in math and science.
And this is where we are going to do things a little differently than we usually do here. I do not want to keep explaining this to you from the perspective of a man who doesn't even play professional chess. So I interviewed two fantastic women who do. Sanjana Joeel and Rujuta Desai. Both have represented India in a University level tournament in Brazil couple of years ago and continue to play chess professionally. I know Sanjana now for 5 years and she introduced me to Rujuta a few weeks ago.
Sanjana studies engineering and Rujuta is a baker by profession (her cakes look absolutely amazing btw, check them out here after you are done reading this).
Both of them had a similar start to their chess career. Both of them started it as a summer activity with their elder siblings and then eventually just ended up being really good at it. Rujuta chose chess over dance as a kid (can't prove but probably the most picked hobby for girls in India. Why is it important? Hang on just a couple of minutes.) and she says it seemed to have paid off for her.
After some pleasant conversations, we got right to it. "Do you think there was a bias against you as a player while growing up?" Both of them sounded very confused about this. Who is this kid? What does he even want from us? Seemed like I was the first person to ask them this. I thought this was obvious. I thought they will jump on this question and give me a 3 hour monologue. But I was wrong. I was going to find out why.
"Growing up, I played with 3 girls and my coach who was also a man. My current coach is also a man. I regularly played against boys when I started, but was playing in competitions and tournaments against girls. I never quite understood why there weren't more girls around me but I never thought about it. Some tournaments even had 10:1 boys:girls ratio", Sanjana starts telling me. "But I was always told, 'that's how it is." You read that. That is how it is. When you think the stacked odds against you is what normal is, you stop thinking of yourself as a victim of the systemic bias.
"My brother played brilliantly as a kid. I was regularly winning competitions growing up, but in the women's section. And he used to regularly finish just short of the finish line. So every time I won, he always used to tease me saying, 'Oh, but that's not a real tournament victory you know that right?' Don't get me wrong my brother loves me and is very proud of me but that is just something you just have to live with as a female chess player. Your victories are never the same. People will always patronize you. It's like winning the little league", Rujuta adds. Rujuta was the district champion for 7 years from ages 12-19, just to give you the perspective.
"Someone has actively come to me and said that men are better at chess than women. Players, our friends we play with, tell us that too. And they are indeed higher rated than us so we can't deny that. But you know what? They used to tell us the exact same thing as kids too, ages 5-6, when rating doesn't even exist. That grows on you psychologically. Everyone from parents, to coaches, to even the boys and girls you play with, keep telling you the same thing. It is hard to get out of that mental block. To make matters worse, guys are told they are better at chess too. It is just heartbreaking sometimes."
And then all experiences started just pouring in. "You know, there were hardly any women on the organizing committees of the tournaments we used to play. We rarely had someone we could go to voice our problems." Sanjana started looking back. "Even though the situation is now better, the place which held most of the tournaments in Pune, didn't even have a functioning women's washroom for years. There isn't even any excuse for that. We complained but the complaint fell on deaf ears."
At this point I was itching to ask something that has been on my mind for a very long time. Does their performance vary depending on whether they play against a guy or a girl? Sanjana had an interesting take, "I don't think my approach towards the game changes a lot. But a man of a similar rating seems harder to beat than a woman even though there is no rational logic. I have sometimes had trouble converting a game. I worry about my rating dropping a little too much than all boys and men around me who are far more fearless" I was like okay, maybe it's just a mindset issue. And then she tells me, "Oh but you know, one of the most common advices I receive is that 'Attack your opponent if she is a woman and she will crumble.' And it works. It has worked for me and against me." This was very weird for me at that point. You are basically telling women that if you are aggressive against them, they will crumble? They won't be able to handle the pressure? I asked her how was she okay with it. " You know, it does sound very wrong. But if it works, it works."
"Safety is a big issue that plays on every female player's mind growing up. I have actively avoided a tournament in Delhi after Rujuta had a bad experience there", says Sanjana. "When we had gone to Delhi, my mother and I, we were stalked by a group of men in the area we were living. It was a very traumatic experience. I cannot even imagine what I would have done if I was alone", Rujuta narrates about her experience in the capital.
"Travel and lodging at different places was also something that is not straightforward. I very much wanted to go and live in Europe and play there for a couple of months. But that meant me, my coach and then one of my parents would have had to come with me and stay. And that was very expensive and also just unfair to my parents who would have had to shut down their work for that time. And I decided to skip those tournaments, which probably is not good for me in the long run, but it is what it is." This was a common theme of our conversation. It is what it is.
"I will tell you a funny story which was actually very infuriating at the time. I was taking a chess class in an apartment complex in Pune and there was a healthy turnout with almost 15 girls and some boys. It was all going fine and then one day there was this mass exodus where almost all girls quit my class to join a Zumba class couple of blocks away. These were young age 6-10 girls so I am not sure if this was their decision. Parents actively moved them from a chess class to a Zumba class." I was absolutely sorry and asked her where this was.
This happened in one of the most famous apartment complexes in Pune. Just a few blocks away from where my parents live. And I lived. For 10 years. And that, is what I realized is the biggest undertone of this story. None of this is hidden. It is all plain out in the open. And yet we all choose to make this problem bigger, everyday.
"It is crazy how much conditioning goes into play. I have seen 5 year old boys being visibly upset when they lose against a girl. I have never seen a girl get upset when she loses against a boy. I always brushed it off as I don't know what goes in their head and don't even know what to do", Rujuta adds.
At this point I wanted to look for solutions. What will make things better? "Pushing girls from a very very young age, say from ages 5 or so to play in open tournaments is the single biggest solution. No one will improve till then. Yes, they will win less initially maybe. But if we manage to keep the moral of all these girls high and tell them that this loss is temporary and they will get those victories soon, that is how we are going to get a superstar. Honestly you don't even have to say any of this. They are kids. They don't care about any of it until you feed it into their head. Also they might just win everything. You never know."
I ask them if we do this a little too rapidly, this might end up driving girls away as they won't see women winning anything currently. We can't just reset the system. What about the ones playing now? How will that impact the kids growing up. "Look, the current system isn't working now is it? Definitely worth giving a shot. Don't you think?" They were right. I didn't know what to say.
I ask them if they think the rise of engines is helping women prepare better as now the coach component can be replaced by a machine that doesn't exhibit bias. "It is hard to say. Coaching is not just about telling you which move is good and which is bad. It is about developing that mindset and teaching you which move to play when, which the computer cannot teach. It has definitely made things easier but it is not something that entirely democratizes the playing field."
Chess had an meteoric rise in viewership and number of new registered players in the last 4 months, epitome of which came when Hikaru Nakamura rose to the top of the list of streamers on Twitch TV. If you don't know what Twitch is, I really think it is time to sit down at the dinner table with your kid/younger sister or brother so they can bring you up to speed about the culture. The ability to play remotely via online platforms made chess one of the most played online games in the period of March-Now. The hope is that as chess starts being exclusively played online, where you don't have to reveal who you are, things might start looking up. There are serious issues in the online world too, with people straight up harassing women commentators. The misogyny is terrifying. But again as we have proven here that it happens at a much younger age, the fault lies in all of the parents. Of yesterday, of today and maybe of tomorrow. Unless we do something about it.
This problem percolates everywhere. Should I hire this woman who has to look after 2 kids and has in-laws to attend to or should I hire a man who traditionally is 'free' of all such responsibilities and will probably attend all the 10 pm meetings? And till someone has taken care of 2 kids and has reached the top, they won't understand how outrageously difficult it is to do so and empathize with that person for once. This is just a never ending cycle that has to end. We have to stop penalizing women for the things that are not just their responsibilities. We have to stop penalizing them for taking time off for pregnancies, for example.
I have always been around strong women in my life who did and continue to do absolutely amazing things. My mother, my sister, my friends. All of them are strong women who taught me a lot of things and have helped me become what I am today. I am pretty sure it is the same for all of you. I want my daughter to be a world champion, some of you probably do too. And it can't happen till all of us play our part, which actually started yesterday. We can no longer keep saying it's a chicken-and-egg problem. We don't even have to do anything special. We just have to stop doing things that we have been doing for centuries. Like, stop picking hobbies for our kids based on their gender. Stop telling them they can do one thing better based on their gender, based on premonitions that are scientifically unproven.
Till then, Susan Polgar is training thousands of girls in St. Louis, Missouri. Solving one Catch-22 at a time. Judit is commentating online at chess24.com and making everyone just look like a patzer (dumb chess player), even all the super GMs of today. And me? Still trying to win a game of chess against Sanjana and Rujuta. Cheers.
Watch this video on your way out if you can spare another 10 minutes. Promise you, it is worth your time.
More sources to read from-
https://en.chessbase.com/post/why-are-men-better-chess-players-than-women
https://en.chessbase.com/post/explaining-male-predominance-in-chess
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/pdf/10.1098/rspb.2008.1576
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/10/12/queen-chess-says-hard-imagine-women-competing-level-men/
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