Since the first official World Chess Championship was held in 1886, there has never been a single female player competing for the ultimate prize in chess. This year’s World Chess Championship in Singapore ended historically on December 12th with the youngest winner in history and it’s still no exception. And yet it’s fair to say that women in chess have come a long way.
Back in the 1980s, former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov remarked, in a Playboy interview, that “there is real chess and women’s chess.” By 2002, he’d lost to Judit Polgar, the best female chess player in history, and rescinded his statement. Earlier this year, Women’s World Champion Ju Wenjun upset Alireza Firouzja, a male player who was sixth in the world at the time, in a solid positional victory.
These successes have, in chess forums and online discourse, led to increasing calls to “abolish women’s chess.” It’s clear that men do not have some sort of biological advantage in chess, so why have separate women’s tournaments and women’s titles with lower qualification requirements? “The existence of women-only events and titles implies that women can’t compete with men,” the comments go. “It’s that type of thought… that makes people believe women still need special help to get by in the world. Are chess pieces in men’s tournaments too heavy for you to pick up?”
There are actually no men’s tournaments in chess—there are women-only tournaments, and open tournaments, accessible to all genders. The World Chess Championship falls into the latter category, though only male players have qualified for the Candidates Tournament—an eight-player event held to determine the challenger for the World Chess Championship—in recent years. The last time a woman made the tournament was when Polgar played it in 2005.
In large part, this is because chess, historically, has been a men’s game: There’s little to no record of women playing chess competitively until 1884, when the first women’s tournament was held in England. By the 1950s and 1960s, the setting of the popular Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit, a handful of women began making a name for themselves in the women’s chess scene, though they were unable to break into the elite ranks of world chess. In the mid to late 20th century, women’s titles were implemented to address the severe lack of gender equality in chess.
Since 2009, there’s been a 70 percent increase in female chess players registered in the United States. But although times have changed, women in chess are still few and far between, and young girls continue to leave the game at much higher rates than boys. As such, women-only tournaments and titles are necessary, even if some might find them insulting. Without them, professional chess may see little to no women at all.
For once, women’s tournaments provide reprieve from the often hostile open tournament experience, where there’s little supportive community available for female players, and where there still exists an unspoken bias that being paired against a woman equates to an easier win. This is on top of outright instances of discrimination and harassment female players face in the sport at large: in 2023, several women came forward to accuse Alejandro Ramirez—a top chess player and coach—of sexual misconduct dating back to 2011, when some of these women were minors. The U.S. Chess Federation and the powerful Saint Louis Chess Club allegedly knew about the accusations for years before they became public.
That same year, fourteen top female chess players from France published an open letter in which they denounced the “sexist or sexual violence” they experienced in the past. “We are convinced that this harassment and these assaults are still one of the main reasons why women and young girls, especially in their teens, stop playing chess,” they wrote.
It’s true that the drop-off rate for young girls and women in chess is high. In 2015, when I was five years old and played my first three tournaments as a beginner, around a quarter of the field were girls. Today, I’m in the top 0.5 percent of American players, and for every female player, by my own estimate, there are around fifteen male players in any given open tournament. Of around two thousand Grandmasters worldwide, a mere forty-two are women. In the World Top 100, there are zero women.
Parents and coaches are partially at fault for this. A 2023 study found that they still tend to value the potential of female young players lower than that of their male counterparts, making girls more likely to doubt themselves in the game, or quit altogether. In local East Coast open tournaments, it is rather rare to see an adult woman in the field. Instead, the boards are filled with a bunch of grown men playing twelve-year-old girls.
At women’s tournaments, these concerns disappear. Beyond that, top women-only tournaments often come with prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars, thereby helping women fund their careers. Being a professional chess player is expensive: you have to account for travel across all continents, coaching costs, and tournament entry fees, which can go up to $600.
Finally, winning women’s tournaments and titles—while lower-level—is still widely respected and covered in chess commentary and media. Women’s tournaments give me a platform to prove myself on the national and international stage. And not only is it motivating for me to win, it’s also motivating to see other women win. Reading about Ju holding her own against chess prodigies of the likes of Firouzja in open tournaments makes me hopeful that one day we may not need women’s chess anymore.