Gender Discrimination in Go
Table of contents |
Observations that give rise to the question of "Is there discrimination in Go?"
- Women constitute about 50% of the population.
- Women are a much smaller portion of professional go players compared to the general population.
Assumptions
- It is assumed that a desirable outcome would be for the proportion of female professional go players to be closely approximate the proportion of women in the general population.
Limitations
- It would be preferable to have data for the entire go playing population. However such data are difficult to obtain. Only a self selected portion of general go playing population chooses to join clubs or national associations. Among the data sets that are readiably available are: professional results, European Go Database and AGA Go Database.
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Statistical correlation is not causality, we must distinguish between attributable to and attributed to or caused by.
- Statistics obtained from a self selected population may not reflect the statistics of the general population.
Question
- Is the relative absence of women in the population of professional go players is the result of discrimination?
- What is the reason for the relative scarcity of women in professional go compared the percentage of women in the general population?
General Population
It is worth pointing out that female players are subject to certain, social factors that may create a climate of discrimination against women in the game. These social factors include:
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Pair Go, begun in 1990 with its own world championship tournament, is an example of a deliberate, sustained, and well funded effort to reach out to women players.
National Associations
Among the national associations, there is no indication of gender based discrimination against women in the American Go Association.
Professional
In professional tournaments and title matches, there is no indication of gender based discrimination against women. Women are free to enter all professional tournaments under the same qualifying conditions as men. There are tournaments reserved for women only. Men are excluded from these tournaments. These tournaments constitute discrimination in favor of women by guaranteeing the set of women professional players a minimum number of title and the monetary rewards associated with those title. We have not been able to reach a consensus conclusion why the percentage of go professionals or open title holders that are women is significantly less than the percentage of women in the general population.
It is worth pointing out that professional female players are arguably institutionally designated as weaker by the qualification system and are definitely subject to the same social factors that may create a climate of discrimination against women in the game. (See list of factors in General Population section above.)
Research Article that bear on the question or related questions
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Sex differences in the right tail of cognitive abilities: A 30 year examination to be published in the journal Intelligence investigates the male-female ability ratios from over 1.6 million 7th grade students in the right tail (top 5% in ability) across 30 years (1981-2010) using multiple measures of math, verbal, and writing ability and science reasoning from the SAT and ACT.'' The paper covers results of gender ability differences over the 30 year period (1981 - 2010) showing that disparities have dropped from a 13:1 male-female ratio for the top 0.01% in mathematics as of 1981 to a 4:1 male-female ratio for the same group as of 1991. That 4:1 ratio has remained substantially unchanged over the last 20 years. By contrast, in the male-female ratio for standard written english, reading and writing has varied from 1.00 to 0.58 (extremal values) over the same 30 year period. The data appears to indicate that there is no male-female difference at the mean, but rather the spread or standard deviation is different between the two genders. (16 June 2010)
- The 18 May 2008 issue of
The Boston Globe contained an article entitled
The freedom to say "no" regarding the comparative scarcity of women in science and engineering: When it comes to certain math- and science-related jobs, substantial numbers of women - highly qualified for the work - stay out of those careers because they would simply rather do something else. The article refers
Why are there so few women in Information Technology? Assessing the role of Personality in Career Choice by
Joshua L. Rosenbloom and
Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth After 35 Years by
Camilla Persson Benbow and
David Lubinsky. (18 May 2008)
See Also: