At the very top of chess, the grandmaster don’t have to accept a challange match, right? I don’t see how an old-boy’s network can be completely avoided.

The bias is pervasive and even the blokes, like Sean, who champion women’s rights fall prey to it from time to time. Here’s an example: we were recently brainstorming on names of possible new folks to join us here at CV. The name of someone I’ll call A Theorist was mentioned. Sean wrote back that A Theorist probably wouldn’t be interested because he’s too high up in the physics political hierarchy. That really struck me. Because I am basically on the same political cmttes/panels that A Theorist is on, plus one more.

How do you know that Sean would not have made the same comment, if you were male? Perhaps he views you as atypical for reasons having nothing to do with your sex. Is there not the slightest possibility that your sexism detector requires a bit of recalibration?

Again and again — I have no problem at all with the idea that there are statistical differences in various qualities between men and women. There obviously are, e.g. for height. I also couldn’t care less. What I care about is removing barriers to people living their lives as they want to, and combating the kind of prejudice that elevates local conditions to laws of nature.

On this gender brain difference issue, it bemuses me that it is always the supposed male advantage that is under attack and doubted and scorned and explained away, and never the supposed female advantage. What is wrong with all our little boys that they cannot keep up to the little girls in reading and comprehension and verbal skills? Those differences are never tackled, they are assumed to be innate female advantages and heck, I accept that. Don’t you? Or do you believe men have the capacity to be as strong as women in those areas but, what, society or the educational system or whatever, is holding men back and unduly and unfairly depriving them of equal verbal skills?

Where does it say that females can have unquestioned innate advantages in some areas, and males cannot in others? If females are as equal as men in the (alleged) men’s strengths, and more than equal in their own, then doesn’t that make females more than equal in the aggregate? Gee how fair is that?

We’re different. Viva it.

I don’t have exact numbers, I’m not sure they exist, but in my experience there are at least as many women who play the game as men.

Ask any bridge player, even female players, and there will be close to unanimous agreement that men are stronger players. The average male is a stronger player. The top levels, the national and world tournaments, are all hugely dominated by males. At the toughest competitions, 95% of the entrants will be males.

At tournaments, women even have their own separate contests. There is a Women’s Pairs event, for example. These contests exist to give women a better chance of winning; the competition simply isn’t as strong.

(As an aside, there used to be separate men’s events as well, and those were the toughest events. Those ended maybe 20 years ago when a couple of females sued to play in the Men’s events, and rather than face a protracted and expensive court challenge, the bridge authorities caved and ended all men-only events. Gee thanks. No male has sued to play in the female events.)

Men are more aggressive at the tables and they seem to see deeper into the complexities of card-play.

I read somewhere once, that males are generally better at drilling down on one complex issue, whereas females are better at multitasking. Certainly men can drill down at the bridge table better than women.

Most importantly, please let me be clear: I was not making a dig at Sean. There isn’t anybody I respect more. I was merely trying to illustrate how easy it is for any of us to say something that can discount a woman’s impact. It truly happens quite often! I apologize to Sean that my comment was so poorly written and so easily misconstrued.

Now, back to my calculations of Supersymmetry at the Linear Collider…