chess popularity men vs women

I've recently competed in my first two otb tournaments and can't help but wonder why there are so much more male players than females. In the two tournaments I've been to there has been a total of 3 women playing. the amount of men in the two easily exceeds 100. My question is if anyone can come up with an idea why? I mean this is well out of the margin of error so there has to be some kind of logical explanation?x)

1. Women have a life, especially in regards to children.
2. Women are more social. Chess is an anti-social game.
3. Women are taught to be passive. Chess is mainly an aggressive game.
4. Women were taught to lose to men to protect the fragile male ego.
5. Autism helps with chess skills. Autism is diagnosed more in boys. Although there is a theory that women are underdiagnosed as their symptoms are different.

www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/women-beat-expectations-when-playing-chess-against-men.html states that women play better when paired against men. onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.440 claims that women play worse when the think they are playing against a man, almost dropping their average score in half.

That's a very controversial question.
Formerly, it was thought to be a matter of different brains. "The man was smarter than the woman".
Later, it began to be thought that everything depended on education and that the unequal social treatment of men and women was the only reason.
Some research seems to suggest that there may be biological differences between men and women skills. They are not smarter than others but have different intelligences: Men are more interested in competitive games and sports while women lose interest in them when they reach adolescence.
IMO, it will probably be a mixture of several factors.
And all this, generally speaking, because there are many men who also lose interest in chess they had as children, although in the case of girls this abandonment is massive.
Regards.

Quite disagree with point 2 and maybe slightly disagree with some others.

I think most of women think themselves and their activity in a « common sense ». Maybe they follow more what they think that « people », « society », family are waiting from them.

And chess is a fight, they probably at least unconsciously « leave it for men » in a way.

I mean, the Russian quite dominate the male chess field in numbers.

It’s probably because men are more obsessive and chess is a highly skilled based game. Not because men are smarter

Ever hear of the phrase "10,000 Lady Botvinnik's" ? It was used in an article about women and chess I read, and the notion, that the Soviet school of chess might produce that many :]

Men are interested in things, women are interested in people.

This is evolutionary, since women stayed behind and worked together with other women while men hunted and thus needed planning. This is why today there are more nurses who are women and more engineers who are men. In countries where they encourage women to be engineers and men to be nurses they STILL have this same evolutionary ratio, evolution trumps social engineering :)

Chess is also a war. Women don’t do war. They don’t have as much testosterone for it. All answers are found in nature.

It's not that simple @Kusokosla ... Humans evolve. The role of a woman now is much different than it was back in primal times. There are also more and more women getting in the sciences! And about war, men don't like war either. Only insane people like war. And chess isn't war, it's just using your brain. Difference.

#9

Millions of years of evolution can not be undone by social engineering, is my point.

If anything women are less happy today according to research, apparently. Because anything unnatural isn’t going to make one happy.