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From: lippin@lipton.berkeley.edu (The Apathist)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Chess (Was: Sexism)
Message-ID: <1991Mar16.023153.20594@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 28 Mar 91 03:23:35 GMT
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Recently rao@cl.bull.fr (Srinivasam Rao) wrote:

> Why don't the members of the "weaker" sex prove themselves by
> competing with men in the World Chess Championship and becoming the
> world champion.  Atleast here, they cannot claim any disadvantage of
> physical or mental "weakness" can they.

This relates to a question I've pondered: there are certain
male-dominated fields, such as programming and chess, in which a form
of mastery is attained by starting young and practicing obsessively
through adolescence.  (I'm thinking of hackers in particular here.)
Few people, if any, develop the same kind of skill later in life,
although they may master the field through a different approach (say,
through learning computer science.)

Are there fields in which women achieve mastery in this way?
Presumably I would have ignored them back when I knew more adolescent
girls -- I was too busy being obsessed with male-dominated things.  Or
are girls spared these obsessions, perhaps through earlier adolescence
or greater social skills?

In either case, this may explain why the spread of feminism hasn't
caused a great increase in the number of female chess masters -- few
women have given feminism a great deal of thought at age twelve.

					--Tom Lippincott
					  lippin@math.berkeley.edu

     "In heaven people are more understanding about this than down here."
					--Lynda Barry