Parents and coaches underestimate the potential of young female chess players compared to male international chess players, reflecting a bias seen in the TV series "The Gambit," New York University researchers have found. Despite these biases, the willingness to invest resources in male and female chess players is the same.
Girls and women face intellectual barriers, according to findings from an NYU study co-authored by a former U.S. chess champion.
The Queen's Gambit miniseries charts the life of Beth Harmon, a fictional chess prodigy who has been undervalued in the male-dominated game. A team of psychology researchers at New York University has now found some "real-life" evidence of what Harmon faced when she was young: Parents and coaches of teenage chess players rated female players' top potential lower than male players.
Additionally, the study authors, including two-time U.S. women's chess champion Jennifer Shahad, found that coaches who believed that "smartness" was necessary for success in chess also believed that their female students were more likely than their male students to stop playing due to lack of ability. But at the same time, coaches and parents don't think girls encounter less supportive environments than boys and are more likely to stop playing chess as a result.
Sophie Arnold, a doctoral student at New York University, is the lead author of a paper published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. The study found one reason: "Parents and coaches have biases against female youth players in their own lives."
Andrei Cimpian, a professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and the paper's senior author, added: "It is striking that even parents and coaches who have a stake in girls' success hold biases against them and may have some blind spots about the barriers to girls' success."
Only 13% of the players in the United States Chess Federation ("USChess") are women, raising questions about what causes the gender disparity. Previous research has focused primarily on potential deficits in girls' chess abilities while ignoring the role of adult leadership.
"This line of research would make the overrepresentation of men in chess look like a 'girls and women's problem' rather than a 'chess problem,'" Arnold said.
In the Journal of Experimental Psychology: In contrast, researchers considered how important people in girls' lives—coaches and parents—biased them when assessing their potential, even at a young age, and how those perceptions helped explain the large gender gap among chess players.
To do this, the research team interviewed nearly 300 parents and mentors recruited through the U.S. Chess Federation—90 percent of whom were men. In the survey, they reported on the evaluation and investment of approximately 650 teenage chess players. In addition, parents and coaches were asked whether they thought chess talent required intelligence—an approach Cimpian and his colleagues have used in the past to detect stereotypes and gender bias in academic fields.
Researchers found bias against girls across multiple measures. Parents and coaches believe that female teenage chess players have lower maximum potential ratings on average than male players - a bias that is exacerbated among parents and instructors who believe success in chess requires talent. (The researchers noted that the samples of mothers and female coaches were too small to analyze separately, reflecting the general underrepresentation of women in chess.)
Remarkably, these coaches and parents do not realize that their own presuppositions may be an obstacle to girls' success in chess. Specifically, coaches who believed that intelligence was necessary to succeed in chess also believed that their female students were more likely than their male students to stop playing due to lack of ability. In fact, parents and coaches do not believe that girls encounter a less supportive environment in chess than boys and are therefore likely to stop playing.
However, not all news is bad. For example, the researchers found no bias in the resources (such as time and money) that coaches and parents were willing to invest in female teenage chess players relative to male teenage chess players.
"This study is the first large-scale investigation of bias against young female players and has implications for the role of parents and mentors in science and technology fields, which, like chess, are culturally associated with intelligence and exhibit significant gender imbalances," Arnold noted.