The highest rated woman chess player in the world is China's Hou Yifan. She has an official rating of 2633 and is ranked equal 100th in the world. World number 1 Magnus Carlsen is rated 2837.
Yifan is a four time women's world champion, winning her first in 2010 aged 16. However she has played only spasmodically since 2018 and no longer competes in international tournaments. She is a professor in the sports department of Peking University, having previously held a professorship at Shenzhen University, where she became the youngest-ever full professor at the age of 26, heading the institution’s chess program within the School of Physical Education. Chess can be studied at uni, who knew?
Current women's world champion Ju Wenju,
also from China, is rated 2580 and ranked 292 in the world. And just in case you think I'm copying this from Wikipedia or worse still from ChatGPT, I've been watching Wenju play live on YouTube for the last few days in the Norway Chess Women's tournament in Stavanger (it's better than gardening in the rain and I might improve my chess play, although I do admit it's a bit weird).
BTW it's perfectly possible I've got Chinese names the wrong way round. If so, I hope my Chinese readers will forgive me.
There doesn't seem to be any logical reason that girls/women should be any better or worse than boys/men at chess, so why aren't they doing better than they are? According to Wikipedia "Hou claimed that there are many reasons for the lack of female contenders at the chess top-level. She says there is a physical aspect to long chess games that might advantage men, and that men generally work harder at chess than women growing up. She uses Chinese girls as an example and points out that most prefer a balanced life, prioritizing things such as university and family life at the cost of working on chess. But she claims there also are external factors: girls playing chess growing up are only encouraged to compete for the girl's title, which might lower their motivation."
I'm not at all sure about the physical aspect. A championship game of classical chess can last 5 or 6 hours but don't women run marathons? Run governments working 12 hour days?
Judit Polgar from Hungary is the only woman to ever get into the top ten in the world; her highest rank was number 8 and her peak rating was 2735. She got into the top 100 in 1989 at the age of....12! So it can be done. But a key point of difference is that, once she became good enough, she competed against the top men. She would play in the Open section of tournaments rather than in the Women's section. In the Chess Olympiad, competed for every 2 years, she chose to represent her country in the Open section rather than the Women's and was very successful, playing "top board" ahead of her male compatriots.
Top chess tournaments commonly select many, often most, of their competitors by invitation. The recently completed Norway Chess was a 6 player tournament where the invited players were the current top 5 in the world plus 8th place Wei Yi (I think he was number 6 when the invitations were issued). If women don't play against men they won't get invited.
Then there's prize money. The 2023 World Championship Open had a prize fund of $2 million [which is about what you'd pay to sign a talented 15yo goalkeeper in football]. The Women's World Championship prize fund was $500,000. I suppose you could argue that the temptation of competing for 4 times as much would encourage more women to consider that but, when you realise there are 100 times more men playing chess than women, the half a million seems easier to compete for. Interestingly Norway Chess had equal prize money for the Open and Women's sections but this is rare and, possibly, simply upholds the present differentials.
I'd like to see some of the talented young women - and there are many - electing to play Open tournaments rather than taking the "easy way" against their fellow women. And some tournament organisers issuing invitations to women to play against men in a single section rather than a separate section.
There's an argument that having separate women's Master titles inhibits women's development. A woman can become a WGM - Women's Grandmaster - with a rating of 2300 but to be a Grandmaster (GM) you need 2500. There are are around 41 women who have earned the full, open Grandmaster (GM) title, out of over 1,700 total GMs worldwide, so roughly 2% of GMs are women. Is it possible some women are satisfied with reaching WGM and continuing to play in women-only sections? Obviously I don't know; I'd like to know what they think.
The sport of chess needs a new Judit Polgar, a new Hou Yifan. Who will step up?
