Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

We examine data from over 6.6 million games of tour-nament chess between players rated by the internationalchess authority, FIDE. Previous research has focussed onthe low representation of women in chess. We repli-cate and extend previous analysis (Chabris and Glickman,2006) on an international level. We find no support fordifferential variability, differential drop-out between maleand female players, or social context (in the form of pro-portion of female players at a national level) as drivers ofdrivers of male-female differences. Further, we examinegames between mixed and same gender pairs for evidenceof a ‘stereotype threat’ effect. Contrary to previous re-ports, we find no evidence of stereotype threat. Thoughthis analysis contradicts one specific mechanism wherebygender stereotype may influence players, the persistentdifferences between male and female players suggeststhat systematic factors do exist and remain to be uncov-ered.