Sexism in Chess

Robbie Couch on Upworthy:

Ferrera shared a personal story about a young girl whose telling experience is a tough one to forget:

“I was moderating a conversation once among young women, and there was something that a young girl said that has really stayed with me. She stood up and she asked one of our panelists … ‘I was on the chess team. I was really good. But I was the only girl on the chess team, and it felt hard to be there, so I quit.’ And I haven’t been able to shake that. Because if we can’t get our young girls to stay in the room for the chess team, how are we gonna get them to stay in the room to be leaders in business, leaders in politics, leaders in medicine, leaders in science?”

A sad story, indeed. I know we still have to see a lot more women grandmasters competing at chess’ highest levels (Hou Yifan is currently the highest rated woman chess player at 2663 as of April 2016, and she’s only 85th and the only woman among the world’s top 100), but sexism shouldn’t be a reason why more women shouldn’t get to the top of the chess world.

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