The King’s College study states: “Men are more likely to resign – after fewer moves – against other men than against women.
“Men continue to play against women, even if they would step down if they played against men.”
It adds: “Men’s increased willingness to compete stems from a psychological costs for men of losing a woman.”
The study, published in the journal Quantitative Economic, used data from games involving more than 14,000 players from 154 different national chess federations, and took into account historical attitudes toward women in the chess community.
Fischer and Kasparov
Bobby Fischer said of female chess players: “They are stupid compared to men. They shouldn’t be playing chess,” fellow grandmaster Garry Kasparov once wrote that “every aspect of chess belongs to the domains of male dominance.”
King’s College study co-author Dr Santiago Sanchez-Pages believes that the pattern of women performing worse against men than against female peers stems in part from stereotypical expectations of female skills.
She said: “We suspect that the underlying mechanism is a form of stereotype threat – when people are evaluated in a task that negatively stereotypes the group they belong to, they perform worse.
“Even if they want to prove stereotypes are wrong, the fact that they may already have these thoughts strains their cognition.”