Chessmen... or chess women?

Men are NOT better chess players than women according experts from Oxford University who say there are few top female players because girls find the game too boring.

With only one woman currently in the top 100 world ranked chess players many have claimed for years that men brains that are better suited to chess skills.

But researchers from Oxford's Department of Experimental Psychology have found the only reason men are dominant in chess is that very few women like playing it.

A team from Oxford analysed the huge chess-playing population of Germany which is currently just over 120,000 recorded by the German chess federation (GCF).

Germany plays host to more than 3,000 tournaments each year, with the GCF measuring skill levels of all competitive and hobby-based players in the country.

Researchers found that even in one of the biggest chess playing nations in the world, men outnumbered the women 16:1 with 113,386 men regularly playing the board game opposed to only 7,013 women.

The researchers drew up a points-scoring system to judge game intellect from both sexes and found that men only slightly edged it but women scored much higher than anticipated.

The findings show 96 percent of the statistical superiority of men in the game is explained by the fact that the game is played by more men.

Author of 'Does Chess Need Inteligence? and member of the research team Merim Bilalic reckons people are better at chess because of practice and not because they are smarter.

In his findings Mr Bilalic said: "In previous discussions of gender difference, there is often no mention of participation rates, although a wide range of other reasons are given like intelligence.

"Our studies show that practice has the most influence on chess skill and not how clever a person is.

"An explanation for the small number of women at the top level of intellectually demanding activities like chess usually highlights the different intellectual abilities of men and women.

"Our alternative explanation is that the extreme values in a large sample are likely to be greater than those in a small one.

"Although the performance of the 100 best German male chess players is better than that of the 100 best German women, we show that 96 percent of the observed difference is down to the fact a greater number of men play chess.

"There is little left for biological or cultural explanations to account for.

"When there are many more male than female participants, the statistical sampling reflects why women are under-represented at the top end rather than differences in intellectual ability."

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