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"Nice and Pretty"

Whitedancingrockstar2,068 viewsEnglish (US)
ChessOff topicChess Personalities
A study about sexism in Swedish chess during the years 1990 – 2005

This paper was written as part of a course at the Institute of History at the Lund University, Sweden.
If you wish to read the original paper in Swedish, you can message me here on Lichess.

Introduction

The theme of the paper

Chess is considered by many to be the ultimate intellectual sport where one's mental capacity is the deciding factor in winning or losing. Like many other generalisations, this one is too crude, but it still tells us a lot about how common people perceive chess to be. So why is it that many people today still think that women are worse at chess than men? This paper examines a Swedish example. Tidskrift för Schack is a chess magazine that has been continuously published for 125 years and has been the clearly most popular chess magazine in Sweden during that period. The aim of the paper is to investigate whether the writers of Tidskrift för Schack wrote differently about female and male players because of their gender, during the period 1990-2005.

More specifically, this paper is about two female players, one from Sweden and one from Hungary. Pia Cramling has been one of the strongest chess players in Sweden during the last thirty years. She has represented Sweden in many different international chess tournaments. Among other things she has been in the Swedish "men's team". As one of the strongest female players of all time, her success has been followed in many different places, as well as in Tidskrift för Schack. The second player portrayed in the paper is Judit Polgár from Hungary, by far the strongest female player of all time, who has during her career been one of the strongest chess players overall. Her journey, as well as Pia Cramling's, from being the youngest chess grandmaster in the world to beating Garry Kasparov in a chess game, one of the strongest chess players of all time, forms the basis of the paper.

Lastly, sexism is the underlying theory that is passively discussed throughout the text. The so-called de Coubertin narrative has had a major impact on the number of women playing chess. Not least in the early 20th century when men, who supported the idea that women cannot play chess as well as men and should therefore pursue other interests, actively discouraged female players from becoming chess players. Traces of these ideas and sayings can still be seen today in many chess magazines and chess contexts in general. Among other things, the essay will investigate whether the de Coubertin narrative was present in Tidskrift för Schack between 1990 and 2005.

Purpose and question

The purpose of this essay is to investigate how the most popular Swedish chess magazine, Tidskrift för Schack, wrote about two female chess players during the years 1990-2005: Pia Cramling, who has been one of the best Swedish chess players during the 1990s and 2000s, and Judit Polgár, who during the same period was one of the best chess players in the world.

My main question is therefore: how are female players portrayed in Tidskrift för Schack compared to male players? My sub-questions are:

  1. Is there a tendency among authors to write about female and male chess players in different ways when it comes to chess-related things?
  2. What do interviews with male and female chess players look like? Were the players asked different questions because of their gender?

Historical background

Chess history

Chess probably originated in Asia, where similar games are thought to have originated. With its arrival in Europe, some of the rules of the game changed; some of the chess pieces changed their character. The queen became the strongest piece on the board, and the pawn was also given more mobility.

History
(Wikimedia Commons)

The low participation of women in chess has been a fact for at least the last hundred years. According to FIDE's (Fédération Internationale des Échecs), the international chess organisation's own figures from January 2020, women make up 15.6% of all chess players. This is an improvement on, for example, 2012 when the percentage was 8.25%. This big difference between 8 years can be partly explained by the way FIDE counted all registered players. Before 2012, only players who played the so-called classical games, where people usually sit for hours to play a game, were counted. After 2012, FIDE also started counting players who played faster time formats such as rapid chess (20 to 120 minutes total per game) and blitz (less than 20 minutes). The figures vary from year to year, but usually it is said that about 5% to 15% players in chess are female. Thus, for every female player there are at least five male players. That is a massive dominance of male players.

According to Jakub Ryszard Stempień's social-historical study on women in chess, the large difference in the number of female and male players was caused by the 19th century institutionalisation of chess. Chess became a male sport because women were not considered to have the brain capacity to play chess at the same level as men. Men formed their own chess clubs and organised their own chess competitions. Stempień's analysis highlights that women's participation in chess in the Middle Ages until the 19th century was probably in fact quite comparable to men's and that the problems we see today stem precisely from the period of the 19th century to the early 20th century when women were actively discouraged from playing chess.

Stempień divides the most common opinions about female participation in chess into two different narratives. The Steinitz narrative, after the first official world champion Wilhelm Steinitz, views women's participation in chess positively and actively tries to get more women to become chess players. The second narrative, the Coubertin narrative after Pierre de Coubertin who was one of the creators of the modern Olympic Games, looks negatively at women's participation in chess and does not think that women can achieve the same level of chess as male players. This division was more relevant in the early 20th century when the struggle between these two different mindsets was at its peak. Later in the 20th century, the Steinitzian narrative became increasingly popular, but traces of the de Coubertin narrative still live on today. Some examples include the strongest player in the world in the 1960s saying that women are stupid compared to men and play chess as beginners. In addition, one of the best chess players of the 1990s and current FIDE vice president, Nigel Short, has said that women are biologically not as good as men at playing chess. However, there is little evidence to support his claim.

Controversially, there are two different types of chess titles and chess tournaments today organised by FIDE. The so-called open titles are four; Grandmaster (GM), International Master (IM), FIDE Master (FM) and Candidate Master (CM). These can be obtained by any chess player. The second type of titles are women's titles; women's grandmaster (WGM), women's international master (WIM), women's FIDE master (WFM) and women's candidate master (WCM). All women's titles can be obtained with 200 points lower in rating than the corresponding open titles, which makes WGM equivalent to FM in rating, WIM equivalent to CM while WFM and WCM are below any open title. Open tournaments are much more common nowadays than women's tournaments. However, they do occur regularly in some contexts. For example, there is always an open Olympics where both men and women can be part of the team, and a Women's Olympics where only women can participate. Like the Olympics, the World Cup is also divided into an open tournament and a women-only tournament called the Women's World Cup. This division of titles and to some extent tournaments is highly controversial to this day with some people arguing that women's titles and tournaments encourage more women to play chess. Another group of people see mainly women's titles as purely sexist and a typical example of the de Coubertin narrative.

Tidskrift för Schack magazine was first published on Saturday, January 5, 1895, by the Copenhagen Chess Association. During its 125-year history the magazine has been published continuously throughout the years. The number of issues published in a year varied. The studied period had ten issues of the magazine per year. Nowadays four issues are published, which was done in 2020 for example. An issue usually contains summaries of the most important events that have taken place since the last issue was published; columns, interviews, and lots of game analysis. These game analyses usually make up half of the pages and contain chess terms and concepts that are difficult to interpret for the non-chess reader. Tidskrift för Schack is thus almost exclusively read by chess players or people interested in chess.

Cramling and Polgár

Pia Cramling was one of the best Swedish chess players in the 1990s and one of the best and highest ranked female players in the world. As a chess player she has participated in several chess Olympiads and represented, as mentioned in Tidskrift för Schack, the Swedish "men's team". At the individual level she has participated in a few Women's World Championship matches but has not managed to win the title at any time. She has, however, won two gold medals in the European Women's Championship, in 2003 and 2010. In addition to the World and European Championship matches, she regularly participated in the Swedish Chess Championship, which is organised every year, during the 1990s and 2000s. In 2000 she came close to winning the Swedish Championship title and a few other times she also came close to winning the competition, but never close enough to become the Swedish Chess Champion. At the age of 58, she is less active in chess today than she was during the studied period in the 1990s and 2000s. At the time of writing, she is however signed up to play the 2021 Swedish Championship as one of about twenty Swedish players. After all these years she is still on the list of the best chess players in Sweden.

Judit Polgár, like Pia Cramling, has never won a Women's World Championship title. During the entire studied period, she was clearly the best female player in the world. She was one of the best chess players in the world like no other woman before. The reason why she has never been a Women's World Championship winner is because she always refused to participate in women's tournaments at all. When Judit became Grandmaster in chess, she broke Robert James Fischer's, former world champion, record of becoming the youngest Grandmaster in the world. She was only 15 years and 4 months old.

Polgars
(Judit, Zsuzsa & Zsófia Polgár with their father László Polgár 1989, Wikimedia Commons)

However, the Polgár sisters are three and have all won a chess title, Judit and Zsuzsa are grandmasters of chess while their younger sister Zsófia holds the lesser title of international master. In 1995 they were some of the highest ranked female players in the world. Judit ranked first, Zsuzsa second and Zsófia sixth of all female players in the world. Sweden's Pia Cramling was then ranked fourth in the world among women. Judit played matches and tournaments at the top level for twenty years until 2014 when she stopped playing competitive chess. Among other things, she won the famous Hastings Chess Tournament in 1993. Nine years later she beat one of the best chess players of all time, Garry Kasparov, in a rapid chess game for the first time. Kasparov had said earlier in the 1990s that Judit would never become world champion, partly because she was a woman. Kasparov has since apologised for this statement and said he was wrong. Judit described this game, which caused Kasparov to leave the room immediately, as one of her most remarkable moments in her career. In 2005, Judit found herself the eighth highest ranked chess player in the world with a chess rating of 2735, her best rating to date. Interestingly, this was the same year that Garry Kasparov, who had a rating of over 2800 at the time, decided to stop playing serious chess. Judit played successfully and stayed in the top chess rankings until 2014 when she announced her end of professional chess playing.

Previous research

Chess is an old game and there is a fair amount of research on how chess affects people. In addition, various researchers have tried to explain, from an international perspective, why women are so underrepresented in chess. On the other hand, there is not much similar Swedish research on chess in Sweden. Chess today is not very popular in Sweden, especially compared to 50 years ago when Sweden had some chess players at the top of the world. Hence, there has not been much research on chess in Sweden in the last 20 years, but studies on similar issues in other sports have been conducted.

One of the above-mentioned international researchers, who is also mentioned in the Historical Background, is Jakub Ryszard Stempień. His study explained the low participation of women in chess due to the institutionalisation of chess in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when women were actively encouraged not to play chess. They were supposed to engage in something else instead. Traces of the so-called de Coubertin narrative persist to this day and, according to Stempień, are the reason for men's dominance in chess.

Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark studied how men compared to women choose to play more aggressive or more solid and calm games when they meet chess players of the same or different sex. They found that men generally chose to play more aggressively against women, even though this strategy had a negative effect on their chances of winning. Women, according to the study, do not show any major differences in their play when facing men or women, except in one specific case. Women who face higher ranked female players choose to play more aggressively against them which, as in the case of men, reduces their chances of winning.

A 2008 study examined whether women perform worse when they meet men or other women. The study was conducted online. The results clearly showed that women performed worse when they played men compared to women, but only when they knew they were doing so. When women falsely believed that they were playing other women, their performance was as expected for their level of play. It was argued in the study that the reason for these results is gender stereotypes that make women perform worse because of them.

Tom Stafford's 2018 study examined a similar issue, but with much more data from real tournaments. His study found that women actually perform better when they face men, something that goes directly against the 2008 study. In his study, Tom Stafford found no evidence of stereotype threat, the worry about performing worse and thus confirming the negative stereotypes. His study showed negative stereotype threat, that is, what was already mentioned above, that women perform better when playing against male chess players. Approximately 5.5 million international chess games were used in this study compared to 42 chess players who played a number of games online in the 2008 study.

A third study from 2018, co-authored by David Smerdon, who is also a chess grandmaster, focused on the results presented by Tom Stafford in his study. They argued that Tom Stafford's method biased the data and therefore led to a result that he got in his study. After a somewhat modified method with different coefficients, the new study concluded that women play worse when they face men. It was argued that Tom Stafford's result about negative stereotype threat is not correct. The new study confirmed, according to the authors, that stereotype threat is a factor for women in chess. A result that again showed the same as the 2008 study. That more research is needed about this topic is likely not a controversial opinion.

Smerdon
(David Smerdon, Wikimedia Commons)

Since there has not been as much research on chess in Sweden as there has been in the international context, especially with regard to why women do not participate as much as men, a more general study on sport in Sweden has been chosen to investigate why women generally do not participate as much in sport and why they are not encouraged to do so. Inger Eliasson has made a socio-cultural analysis of floorball culture, where men dominate as coaches, and tried to relate her findings to sport in Sweden from a more general perspective. The results showed that the problem was nuanced and socially constructed. Within the floorball culture there are norms that men are coaches, which make it more difficult for women to become floorball coaches. In addition, there is a risk that women turn down the job in order not to be belittled or questioned because of their gender.

Material and method

Material

Source material that was processed for this essay comes directly from the Swedish Chess Federation's website and is available free of charge to everyone. The choice to examine this source material was easy because Tidskrift för Schack is undoubtedly the most popular chess magazine in Sweden and is officially distributed by the Swedish Chess Federation to all its members. How the Swedish view of female players looks like and how much sexism there is in Swedish chess is directly influenced by both the Swedish Chess Federation and its chess magazine, Tidskrift för Schack. Hence the choice to investigate that particular source material. The reason why the studied period is the years 1990-2005 is because it was precisely then that Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár were the most active. Stories about both players were common and the chess magazines wrote a lot about them. Besides that, 2005-2006 were the years of the end of one era in chess. Garry Kasparov stopped playing serious chess, Vladimir Kramnik, then world champion who beat Garry in 2000 for the world championship title, lost his title to Viswanathan Anand from India and Judit Polgár also took a minor break from serious chess competitions.

Method

In order to answer the chosen research question, it is appropriate to use a comparative method. Directly from the sub-questions of the research comes the question of comparing female and male chess players, in this case Pia Cramling, Judit Polgár and some of the male players mentioned in the Tidskrift för Schack. Some focus during the analysis will be put on the game analyses played by Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár respectively. As these analyses may require chess knowledge and are generally a heavy material to read, I will limit myself to writing about only single games from both players. Most of the analysis will be devoted to the texts where the authors of Tidskrift för Schack talk about either Pia Cramling or Judit Polgár. Special focus will be put on the interviews with both Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár, of which there are a number in the studied source material. For this part of the analysis, parts of the discourse analysis will be used. In particular, which words are used in which contexts and how the authors use them to advance some kind of agenda. In addition, these words and the authors' general writing style will also be compared with the description of male players.

The selected source material, representing more than 1000 pages of text, has not been fully read. Instead, the reading method has been to browse through the many journal issues and try to find relevant texts in them. This was facilitated by the fact that most issues have the same or similar structure, with news in the chess world, interviews and game analyses almost always ending up in the same place. Because of this, it is less likely that something extremely relevant to this study has been missed and thus not included in the analysis. The texts and words that have been found have been analysed both comparatively and discourse-analytically.

The analysis itself will be divided into three parts. The first part will analyse everything that was written about Pia Cramling; how her games were discussed, what words and writing styles were used and how often Pia Cramling appears in the magazine at all. Like the first part where the description of Pia Cramling is analysed, the second part of the analysis will go through mostly the same things regarding Judit Polgár. The third and final part of the analysis will deal with the aforementioned interviews with Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár. These will also be discussed in parts one and two, but in part three they will be compared with interviews made with some male players. In addition to these comparisons of interviews, more general points will be discussed, as well as the choice of words when talking about male players versus female players and some typical examples of all of the above. Finally, things such as the layout of the chess magazine will also be discussed, how much focus is put on female and male players respectively in addition to Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár, and how in general terms one can see that a distinction is made between "women's chess" and "men's chess".

Criticism and explanation

The main possible criticism of the choice of sources is that they come from one and the same place, Tidskrift för Schack. It is clearly true that Tidskrift för Schack is not fully representative of the whole of Sweden, but the purpose of the paper is also not to answer questions about the whole of Sweden. The essay focuses precisely on Tidskrift för Schack and examines that journal, which in turn may represent chess in Sweden to good extent. However, the discussion about the exact influence of Tidskrift för Schack and its degree of representativeness for chess in Sweden is not one of the themes of the essay. Hence, there are not many reasons to expand the source material beyond just Tidskrift för Schack's own published issues.

More criticism can be given to the choice of the studied period, the years 1990-2005. The year 1990 was chosen because it was around that time that Judit Polgár appeared on the scene, Pia Cramling had already been known in Sweden since the 1980s. As the end year of the study 2005 was chosen because it was the end of an era in chess, something that was already mentioned in the subchapter Materials. These limitations may seem somewhat artificial and without real meaning. This may be true to a certain extent. The reason for the particular restriction made for this paper is not clear-cut, and other periods could also be chosen to investigate similar issues. However, the aim of this type of paper is not to make a comprehensive study of any of the chosen themes, and this study does not attempt to do so. Therefore, these constraints, if somewhat artificial, have been chosen for this particular paper. Much larger studies would be needed to investigate similar questions about the entire history of the Tidskrift för Schack, or some other possibly larger periods. This type of paper should be limited to a smaller period where the chosen constraint still has some thought behind it, as has been done here.

As for the methodology, one may wonder why no other methods were used in addition to the comparative method and parts of discourse analysis. The answer to this question is similar to the one already given above. The paper should be limited to a small study that can reasonably be done on the size given. Why the comparative method in particular is the basis of the paper can easily be justified. The whole purpose and theme of the essay is about comparing female chess players with male ones. Parts of discourse analysis where words and their meanings are investigated fit this investigation well as well.

Why Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár have been chosen for this essay can also be questioned. Maia Chiburdanidze, for example, has also been one of the strongest female players in the world who had a great impact on women's chess in the 1990s. She was the strongest Soviet female player in the 1980s and women’s world chess champion. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, she represented Georgia at many Olympic Games. Like her, Xie Jun was also a renowned player. She comes from China and became women’s world champion after Maia. In addition, Vera Menchik was also a prominent chess player during her time. Between 1920 and 1940 she was as dominant among women as Judit Polgár was in the 21st century. All these women have had a great impact on chess in general and have gone down in history as very important figures. This paper, however, does not attempt to examine the entire history of Tidskrift för Schack and has been limited to the years 1990-2005. In a study of the 1920s Tidskrift för Schack, Vera Menchik's contributions would certainly have been discussed. For the 1990-2005 period Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár fit very well. A Swedish and an international player who are also frequently described in the journal, much more frequently than Maia Chiburdanidze and Xie Jun who also played during the same period. That is why the paper is about Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár and not about any other female chess players.

Analysis

Pia Cramling

"Pia Cramling, 27, will be part of the men's Olympic team in Novi Sad, Yugoslavia later this autumn." This is how the headline in Tidskrift för Schack issue 7 in 1990 begins. Everyone knew that this was something sensational, because it was unimaginable that a woman, except Chantal Chaudé in the 1950s, could participate in the men's Olympic team. In fact, it was not a "men's team" but an open Swedish team for both sexes. The fact that it is called a "men's team" in Sweden for chess is somewhat of a Swedish phenomenon. In international contexts, people have generally talked about open teams and teams for women, even though it has always been a matter of significant male domination in the Olympics and World Chess Championships. Pia's participation in the Swedish "men's team" is a recurring fact during the 1990s and early 2000s.

Pia
(Pia Cramling in 2015, Wikimedia Commons)

Like Ulf Andersson, the best Swedish chess player of the time, Pia is the most talked about chess player in Tidskrift för Schack. Her name appears in the majority of published issues. However, this is nothing strange. Ulf Andersson is mentioned about as often, and together with Pia Cramling they formed the Swedish chess elite. The tournaments Pia played are very often described in the magazine and her games are also often published. One example is the Grandmaster tournament in Bern from 1991 where Pia both participated and then commented on her own games in the magazine. The other example is in Las Palmas, 1992, where Pia again participated and therefore had a chapter written about her tournament in the Tidskrift för Schack issue 1 of the same year. Similar examples occur about once a year, as well as Pia in Crete from 1994 , Biel 1994 , Canary Islands 1996 , Pamplona 1997 , Yugoslavia 1998 etc. That she is given so much space in the magazine is still something very unusual. Ulf Andersson, who was definitely the strongest Swedish chess player at that time, is given about as much space but apart from him very few other chess players come close. This is probably mostly due to the fact that Pia was, and indeed still is today, by far the strongest female player in Sweden.

The fact that she is often described in the magazine also means that many of her games are analysed, both by her and by other grandmasters, for readers. One such example comes from the aforementioned tournament in Las Palmas. There she herself commented on her game against the then Yugoslavian Grandmaster Miodrag Todorčević. Commenting on her own game is nothing strange, and many other Swedish Grandmasters can be found in Tidskrift för Schack's issues where they also go through their own games. An earlier example comes from 1990, the national match against Finland where the Swedish victory was great. She was one of eight Swedish participants in the tournament. Her best game is the one shown first in the match analysis. Curiously, her game is the only one, of those actually analysed, that is not shown fully. The moves of the other games were published in full, while only parts of Pia's game are in the text. To the chess-savvy reader, the position looks as if it has come out of a Steinitz-French opening where white misplayed the position and gave black, Pia in this case, everything she wanted from the position. However, all this is just a guess on my part, and the actual moves that were played to reach that position are almost impossible to guess. What this is due to, that the author chose not to publish all the moves that take up very little space in the text, is very unclear but something definitely worth noting. Later publications of Pia's games from the 1990s and 2000s lack this inconsistency and her games are usually treated in the same way as other Swedish grandmasters' games.

In 2000, after Pia came second in the year's Swedish Championship, she was interviewed by Göran Lindhé, Örebro SS Avdragaren the magazine's editor, which was also published in Tidskrift för Schack's issue 6 the same year, in a slightly edited version. The questions asked to Pia are not the authors' and Tidskrigt för Schack’s own, but since the interview was edited and later published by them, the responsibility for the questions is borne by both the interviewer Göran Lindhé and the Swedish Chess Federation who published this material. There was a total of 23 questions asked to Pia, the majority of which were about purely chess-related things, like the World Chess Championships, travels to tournaments and how to keep chess form. A couple of more relevant interview questions for this essay are the following ones: "You seem to be a very humble and nice person and surely you have many friends out there in Chess Europe. Do you have any, so to speak, best friends?" as well as the questions about her husband Juan and other chess pairs. Whether similar questions are asked of male players will be discussed later. On the other hand, describing female players as "nice" and "humble", or even "good looking" is not an uncommon phenomenon. This is discussed in the section on Judit Polgár.

One type of question that is not asked to male players and that seems to be a recurring theme when interviewing female players, even today, is how to attract more girls to chess. The focus is thus on what female players think about a more general problem that affects all chess players. The fact that there are few girls in chess is not a "girl problem". As discussed in the Historical Background, it is actually the men (those who follow de Coutbertin's view) who have caused this problem. By asking these questions only when talking to women, they are also put in the spotlight of a problem that was not caused by them. Looking at women and expecting them to solve a problem caused by men is clearly not the way to go. Why people have consistently over the years reasoned in this way is bizarre. If anything, it creates the opposite effect of discouraging women who don't want that attention and therefore choose to stop playing chess at an early age.

Finally, it should also be pointed out that the fact that there are fewer women than men in chess is not fundamentally a problem in itself. How many women or men would have played chess if all conditions were equal between the sexes is difficult to determine, perhaps one would still have seen a male dominance, or potentially a female one. That in itself is not very important. However, the fact that there are fewer women in chess because of men and the historically established chess culture that promotes men's success over women's is a major problem that cannot be solved by the traditionally tried and tested methods.

Judit Polgár

As a non-Swedish chess player Judit Polgár is not mentioned as often in Tidskrift för Schack as Pia Cramling. Her tournaments are also not followed as closely as Pia's, and clearly there are no game analyses or comments that she herself writes in the magazine.

For the first time she was in the spotlight during the studied period is in 1990 issue 4 where Garry Kasparov, then world champion, was asked by international journalists if he thought Judit Polgár had a chance to become world champion. The whole interview was translated into English in the magazine. Kasparov replied strongly and firmly that "even a computer has a better chance". Chess computers of the time were much weaker and always lost in matches against top players. It would take another 7 years until Deep Blue, a chess computer from IBM, beat Garry Kasparov in a deeply controversial match. Furthermore, Kasparov continued that male dominance in other genres and sports is also unwavering and that the same is true for chess. Many years later, Kasparov would apologize for this and similar statements he made in the 1980s and 1990s. Later in the interview, no other questions were asked about women in chess or how to go about getting more women to play chess. The fact that these questions were not asked of a male player immediately after talking about one of the best female players is further evidence that the same interview questions are not asked regardless of gender. Women also usually have to answer questions about female participation in chess while men do not have to.

Judit
(Judit Polgár 2008, Wikimedia Commons)

In 1994, in issue 4 of the magazine, Judit Polgár's game against Garry Kasparov was headlined by an interview with Anatoly Karpov, the world champion before Garry Kasparov. Again, this was not the Tidskrift för Schack’s own interview but one that was translated and originally conducted by an international journalist, Albert Minullin. The question was about what Karpov thought about Kasparov's illegal moves against Polgár in their game which became controversial afterwards. Karpov replied that it was very embarrassing for Kasparov, especially since his opponent was a female player. Why it would be more embarrassing to make an illegal move against a female player than a male is unclear to the author of this paper. As in Kasparov's discussed interview, nothing else was mentioned about women in chess other than the issue of Judit's game. That this was a situation that could have happened between any other players besides Judit and Kasparov makes it somewhat less relevant to this text, but still worth noting.

In the first issue of the magazine in 1995 a more concrete example comes from the authors of the Tidskrift för Schack. Judit Polgár made history after playing on the first board of the Hungarian "men's team" in the Olympics. "Although she is both nice and pretty, her male grandmaster colleagues hate to lose to her" . That's the description of her Olympic games. That most male players hated, as some men still do today, losing to female players is not an unknown fact. However, the description of a male grandmaster's success at an Olympics had never even mentioned his appearance or personal character. All chess players hate to lose, it is the worst thing that can happen, no matter if you face a female or male opponent. This is especially true when you play in a team, and you don't fight just to win by yourself. How you look and how you behave has very little influence on the moves you play during a chess game. Judit was already one of the best players in the world at the time of the Olympic games, and this is confirmed by the fact that as the highest ranked chess player in her country, she played on the first table for Hungary. That description is a clear sign that people had, and to some extent still have, a hard time focusing on female chess players as just players and not women. It shouldn't matter at all what gender you are if you want to play chess, but apparently it did for the 1995 authors of Tidskrift för Schack.

Judit's chess tournaments are followed like many other international top players' competitions and her games are analysed in much the same way as others'. The last time Judit was in the spotlight during our studied period is the 2005 issue 2 of the magazine, after the famous tournament in the Dutch city of Wijk aan Zee was played. Her picture appears on the front cover of the magazine and a game analysis appears, among many other games, at the beginning of the text. However, nothing essential to this text, except that the authors described how well she had played in one of her games.

The same issue as Pia Cramling was interviewed in 2000, it was also time for an interview with Judit Polgár after a chess tournament in Malmö. Among the 31 questions asked to Judit, the vast majority of them are about chess-related things, as well as about this particular tournament played in Malmö. For this text, two questions stand out. The first one was about whether it is possible to combine a family life with chess. Why this particular type of question was put to her is somewhat unclear since male chess players generally do not have to answer similar questions in their interviews. The second question is the typical one about women in chess. As with Pia Cramling, the question of why there are so few women in chess is asked of Judit as well. Judit's answer is no more original or unexpected; women lose interest for some reason. The same question has been asked so many times before that after a while you begin to wonder what the point is of asking those questions in the first place. That thought, however, does not seem to have occurred to most people in the chess community, as well as the person who interviewed Judit and the Swedish Chess Federation who published this and similar interviews.

General notes

In order to confirm the previously made statements that questions about women in chess are only asked to female chess players, one can take a further look at the two already discussed interviews with Garry Kasparov and Anatoly Karpov and one with Alexei Shirov. The interview with the then Swedish national coach Håkan Åkvist is also examined.

Apart from the already discussed questions about Judit Polgár, nothing else was mentioned about women in chess during the interview with Kasparov. Like Kasparov's interview, things related to women in chess were not mentioned in Karpov's interview either, except for the already mentioned description about Judit's game against Kasparov. These interviews were not conducted by the Tidskrift för Schack but by international journalists. The Swedish international master Richard Wessman interviewed Alexei Shirov in the same issue of Tidskrift för Schack as the interview with Karpov. In it again there are no comments or questions about women in chess but only chess related things, like Shirov's success in the tournament in Linares.

In 1995 Håkan Åkvist, Sweden's national captain and Eksjö Chess Club's chairman at the time, was interviewed. In the interview, things were discussed concerning Sweden's Olympic successes, why he had resigned as national captain at that time and other things related to chess in Sweden. A more unique answer from Håkan came to the question of what qualities are required to become a national captain. That it needs to be a "he" was clear since the future captaion was constantly described by Håkan as such. "He must be a good psychologist and he must be something like chess knowledgeable. He must also understand the players' conditions both on and off the board." This is the beginning of the answer that Hakan Åkvist gave to the interviewer. The word "he" was used further times during the answer. A clearly sexist statement that the interviewer did not react to, and the authors of the Tidskrift för Schack did not comment on. Something also important that was not mentioned at all during the interview is female chess players. Whether Håkan Åkvist was the captain of both the "men's national team" and the "women's national team" or only of the men was not revealed. Why this question was not put to him anyway is strange, to say the least, as he, even as potential captain of only the men's team, held a position of great power in Swedish chess society. Here it is clearly shown that even Tidskrift för Schack followed the established routine of asking questions about women in chess only to women, who might not be interested in answering such questions, instead of people who actually had the power to influence.

A more frequent phenomenon in Tidskrift i Schack is how the authors wrote about things related to "women's chess"; women players, Women's Olympics, Women's World Championship, Women's European Championship and ranking lists. The fact that all these above-mentioned examples usually ended up after "men's chess" is not just a conspiracy. The Olympic Games in chess are played every two years, both the "men's national team" and the "women's national team" play at the same time. The report of the men's team was almost always first in the text. The success of the women's team was usually described much later in the text. A particularly good example came from 1992, after the Olympics in Manila, Philippines. The men's team reports appeared in issues 7 and 8 of the magazine. The coverage of the Swedish women's team came later in issues 9 and 10 of the magazine. "Due to space constraints, we had to split the report from the Women's Olympic Games. Unfortunately, this has been delayed - we blame, quite shamelessly, Bobby Fischer..." . This was the explanation given for the decision to split the report into two parts and arguably also for the fact the analyses came much later than that of the men’s Olympic games. Robert James "Bobby" Fischer was an American chess player, one of the best of all time, who, after winning the 1972 World Championship title in a match against the Soviet Boris Spassky, stopped playing chess and disappeared completely from the media. Fischer came back in 1992 and played a match against Spassky, which was sensational news at the time. This is the event that the Women's Olympic coverage subtitle referred to. Like the Olympic report, the description of the Women's World Championship, the Women's European Championship and other women's tournaments ended up after the men's chess tournaments. The mentioned rating and ranking lists were published somewhat inconsistently :sometimes the lists included both sexes while on other occasions they were divided among men and women. Why this was done remains unclear.

Fischer
(Bobby Fischer 1960, Wikimedia Commons)

The clear choice, throughout the studied period, to constantly write about the men's team and their tournaments before the women's team is a clear sign that the women's team was not considered to deserve as much attention. The briefly described Swedish study by Inger Eliasson on floorball culture and why there are few female floorball coaches in Sweden fits somewhat well in this context. As in the study where norms made it more difficult for women to become coaches, there is clear evidence of similar things in the case of Swedish chess and Tidskrift för Schack's texts on male and female players. Norms make it more difficult for women to become floorball coaches and norms, like those in Tidskrift för Schack make it more difficult and less attractive for women to become chess players. One cannot expect an equal distribution of the sexes in chess if the conditions for their success are also not equal. Tidskrift för Schack's reports on men's and women's chess in Sweden from 1990 to 2005 are not equal in any way.

Summary

The main result found in the survey about Pia Cramling's and Judit Polgár's descriptions in Tidskrift för Schack is about the two interviews conducted with them. These were compared with the interviews with three male international chess players who, like Judit, were at the top of international ranking lists and the then Swedish national team captain, Håkan Åkvist. The analysis found clear differences between some of the questions that were generally asked of the chess male and female chess players. The majority were about chess related things, which is to be expected from an interview with chess players. Both female and male players were asked the same or similar questions about their chess, how they played in a tournament and more that a chess player usually thinks about. The difference was shown when it came to women in chess in general. Questions about why there are so few women in chess were asked only to Pia Cramling and Judit Polgár. Garry Kasparov, Anatoly Karpov, Alexei Shirov and Håkan Åkvist who also had their interviews published in Tidskrift för Schack were not asked similar questions during their interviews, even though often times they had more to say about the matter. Kasparov and Karpov were interviewed by international journalists who do not work for the Swedish Chess Federation. Shirov and Åkvist on the other hand had to answer questions from Swedish journalists who were in some way tied to Tidskrift för Schack or the Swedish Chess Federation.

Furthermore, during the analysis a clear difference between so-called "men's chess" and "women's chess" was noted. The Swedish "men's national team", which is in fact open to both men and women, received more attention at the biennial Olympics. Other individual competitions such as the European Championship and the World Championship also received more attention from the authors than the Women's European Championship and the Women's World Championship. Women-only competitions were usually presented and described later in the texts.

The survey also found a number of semi-sexist, if not entirely sexist, comments and descriptions, especially by Judit Polgár from the Tidskrift för Schack’s own authors. There were also a number of sexist comments made by the interviewees during the interviews, which the authors of the Tidskrift för Schack did not comment on in any way during publication.

Finally, no particular differences were noted between the games analyses of male or female players. These analyses could sometimes make up half of the entire journal issue and were therefore also important to investigate, even though they usually only contained descriptions of chess positions and nothing else. Except for the occasional case of incomplete analyses and a few strange decisions by the editors during some of the game analyses, no specific difference was noted between the analyses of games played by male and female players. It should also be pointed out that Tidskrift för Schack gave space to female players, especially when it concerned Pia Cramling, and various women's tournaments. The problems discussed are mainly of a qualitative nature, not quantitative.

A less obvious thing that the more observant reader might have realized was that the vast majority of examples discussed in the analysis part of this paper, but also in other parts of the text, came from the 1990s issue of Tidskrift för Schack. Only a few examples from the 2000s were discussed, as well as Judit Polgár's matches against Garry Kasparov. These were an exception. However, the terms "men's national team" and "women's national team" remained throughout the period, and even the tendency to focus more on men's success at the Olympics was a recurring fact in the 2000s. The more obvious examples of the de Coubertin narrative came only from the 1990s. The more structural and systemic differences remained. This shows an improvement over the years, especially at the end of the period. To know whether these more systematic things stayed until today, more research is needed. From a more optimistic perspective, one would think that things at the time of writing this paper, in 2021, are better than they were in 2005.

Pencil
Hoping for a better future

The purpose of the paper and its questions was to answer whether there was a tendency among the authors of the Tidskrift för Schack to write differently about female and male chess players because of their gender. In addition, the interview questions would also be examined; whether there were clear differences between interviews with male players and their female colleagues. The results described above clearly show that the authors of Tidskrift för Schack, and thus the Swedish Chess Federation, made a distinction between what they considered to be "men's chess" and "women's chess". Some things suggesting the de Coubertin narrative were relatively common in the 1990s, as the results showed above, but the more structural and systematically more prevalent things were still present in the 2000s. The answer to the question of whether there were differences between interview questions asked of female and male players is also a yes. The research showed that basically the same questions were asked of women as men, but that in addition to those questions, questions about women in chess were also asked to the women interviewed, although these would have been more appropriate for some of the four men interviewed.

There is room for future research and investigation on the period after the essay, 2005 onwards. These could focus in particular on whether the structure of the Tidskrift för Schack and the mentioned systematic distinction between "men's chess" and "women's chess" has disappeared. Further investigations are possible about the period before to find out what improvements can be found after 1990 compared to the earlier years. This is to investigate how likely it is for current issues of Tidskrift för Schack not to distinguish on an individual and systematic level between women and men in chess

P.S.

Any questions regarding the references used in the paper are welcome in my Lichess inbox, as well as requests to access the full paper in its original form. Translating all the references in text to this blog proved to be a too difficult task. All the sources are listed under, but if you have any questions regarding specific sources and where they are used, feel free to message me on Lichess.

References

Sources

Literature

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