Life In 19x19

It's a lot less popular among women, isn't it? I've been playing for twenty years and faced dozens of male opponents, but never a woman.

On a related note, how popular is Go among women compared to men?

teancoffee wrote:It's a lot less popular among women, isn't it? I've been playing for twenty years and faced dozens of male opponents, but never a woman.

On a related note, how popular is Go among women compared to men?

I think women mostly prefer men. But then I think most men prefer women to go.

I'd have to agree that it is less popular among women, but so are a lot of things. I think part of the problem is that there is a stigma that only men can play games like chess. So many women seem to be intimidated by the thought of playing a game like chess or go. This has been painful for me, because I've wanted to improve the diversity of my university's go and chess club. It is sad to be a club of only white men. We have had a couple of female members attend regularly throughout the years, but never for more than one semester. The same is true of minority students.

That being said, I have played chess (and go) with many women.

The best female chess player I've ever faced is a Russian chess expert who is an international student at my university (1800 Elo according to the Russian Chess Federation). She is proof that you don't need to be a man to be skilled in a game like chess. And she was interested in learning go because one of her chess playing friends had learned it and was beating her. Sadly, she was too busy last semester and so I never got to play more than one game of go with her. She did find the time to handily beat me at club's chess tournament, though.

Also, at my university's cultural events where we teach go and shogi (and also often have chess), I tend to teach and play with about equal numbers of men and women. Of course, our university is about 65% women, so that's actually a bit low compared to what I should see.

Nice avatar.

Just to reply to the question in your thread title:

Yes, often.

Of my 56 tournament opponents accd to egd, 11 were women.

Edit: duh, I thought you asked about Go.

I've only played chess with a handful of adults, but in elementary school when I played chess regularly I would occasionally play some other girls my age, though there were far more boys. Since starting Go, it's been about the same. Probably less than 10% of my over-the-board opponents have been female.

In school tournaments I played girls pretty regularly, but for females over 18 i think I played about 2 or 3 ever.

In go I played the same number of men and women in person, 0.

I learned chess from my mother, and almost exclusively played against her as a child.

I learned Go with my wife, and play her most frequently.

I suspect that's a slight anomaly though, the local go club is about 90% male.

I played against a few women in the chess community, but it wasn't a common occurrence. I hope that's changed a bit.

Jennifer Shahade, a former US women's champ, wrote a book about it: http://www.amazon.com/Chess-Bitch-Women ... 189008509X

In go, I've seen considerably more women, but we're still far from parity.

I suspect (but have no evidence to support), that the reason for the disparity in club attendance is the average social ineptitude of the men who attend, rather than any cultural disinclination to play.

shapenaji wrote:I suspect (but have no evidence to support), that the reason for the disparity in club attendance is the average social ineptitude of the men who attend, rather than any cultural disinclination to play.

I believe it's more due to the fact that less women likes games. In general. Most of the games have an overrepresentation of males, and I doubt this trend is just due to the "social ineptitude" of men.

Men putting women off by being so happy to proclaim women as less intelligent / less capable of such games
Women having less general interest in those sorts of activities than men
Less peer attraction - a gender dominated sport is likely to attract more of the same gender from peer-recommendation and role models
Women being treated unpleasantly (even just being leered at) by men in gender dominated tournaments/events put off further participation

So many reasons that could theoretically explain some of it, probably a combination of all 4 plus another 10 I haven't thought of.

I always wonder though, does it matter? Unless there are women really wanting to play but not playing because they were treated so poorly for example, I don't get the issue...

topazg wrote:I always wonder though, does it matter? Unless there are women really wanting to play but not playing because they were treated so poorly for example, I don't get the issue...

I like to think of a game of go as a conversation. Some of my greatest experiences of the game were playing with people who did not speak English (You know, Brits and the like).

How interesting is a conversation when we limit our partners to those who share our experience?

shapenaji wrote:

topazg wrote:I always wonder though, does it matter? Unless there are women really wanting to play but not playing because they were treated so poorly for example, I don't get the issue...

I like to think of a game of go as a conversation. Some of my greatest experiences of the game were playing with people who did not speak English (You know, Brits and the like).

How interesting is a conversation when we limit our partners to those who share our experience?

Hahaha, yeah, we butchered this darn language!

Are we limiting it? Surely if we wish to enrich the conversation of life (Go is not the only game that has this sort of parallel), then perhaps we should take up more activities with a higher female participation rate (/ different primary language, fit other experienced partner of choice in here) rather than expecting them to pick up new hobbies just to enrich our lives? (yeah, yeah, provocatively worded unnecessarily, but you get the point )

topazg wrote:
Hahaha, yeah, we butchered this darn language!

Are we limiting it? Surely if we wish to enrich the conversation of life (Go is not the only game that has this sort of parallel), then perhaps we should take up more activities with a higher female participation rate rather than expecting them to pick up new hobbies just to enrich our lives? (yeah, yeah, devil's advocate, but you get the point )

It's alright, one day your grip on consonants will slip, and you will join the colonies in our melodious vowel fixation. We won't hold your prior indiscretions against you.

I recognize that my stated reason for female representation is self-serving. I also think everyone should learn go, that it's fun and that women will find it as rewarding as men do. But hey, self-serving reasons are propagating reasons.