@szhzsThe article you linked talks about One standard deviation at most.
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Edit : Also, I didn't see the word "chess" anywhere on the article. the research function did not either. Can you point me to the place where this is adressed?
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I only skimmed it, so I would have to check if the methodology includes the fact that people are already impregnated from patriarchat when they decide what interests they have. But even without that, one standard deviation in interest doesn't even begin to explain the gap in participation.
Don't hesitate to point me to particular parts of the article if I missed something.
My two comments on harassment and job equality are not irrelevant or whataboutism. Stastistically, men harass women more and that was the subject of the original blog post (I know, it's 40 pages ago). I presented it the same way as you, jumping from the statistical to an explaination about interest. Which is not sound. but I wanted to illustrate how your claims were also not sound. That was probably not the best and most efficient way to do so, I'll agree to that.
The one about the pay gap and job inequality was here to illustrate that interest is not such a relevant factor in explaining the innequalities men and women face.
Clearly, there are a lot of innequalities that women face that are due to external factors instead of internal ones. Like the getting harassed, getting worse jobs for worse pay, etc. It seems reasomable to assume that the effects leading to that can also lead to disparity in representation in chess. After all, it's really similar. So it is reasonable to favor the structural discrimination as an explaination for the disparity in chess representation, that's Ockams razor.
So the biological argument is not needed (the social one has precedence) and is also not sufficient to explain what we see.
Also, this is a subject that is really prone to attribution biases (like "she shouldn't have worn a skinni skirt" puting the blame on the person when the problem is external) so one has to be really pay attention when attributing reasons for different symptoms of gender innequalities.
So in short : Yes men and women -and other sex and genders- are on some level different. But not enough to explain the differences in how society treats us differently, and certainly not enough to explain the participation gap in chess.
Which makes it a problem to be adressed. What is "wrong" is not that more men play chess per se, but rather that society discourages women to play chess, through different mechanism, including the amount of harassment they have to endure.
I hope with more details my point comes better across.
