Women are playing chess more than ever before. But champ Jennifer Shahade says there’s still room on the board
A recent chess cheating controversy made headlines on many of the major news outlets. It was a great (or at least public) moment for a game that often doesn’t get mainstream attention. But when chess does make headlines, many can’t help but notice it’s often about male players. So where are all the female players that were all the buzz following “The Queen’s Gambit”? Was that just a minor blip of interest or has the game actually been reaching females?
Good news, said Jennifer Shahade — a two-time U.S. Women’s Chess Champion, woman grandmaster, director of the women’s program at the United States Chess Federation and author of several books on chess. There are more women playing — and yes, that is partly due to “The Queen’s Gambit,” she added. Before the drama aired, just 22 percent of incoming members on chess.com, a website used by more than 20 million people to play chess, were women, compared to 27 percent after the show aired.
But the portion of female players playing the game has been growing steadily for a while, she said, even before the show.
Still, she said, disparities do exist: At this point, just 10.7 percent of 40,000 ranked players with a standard rating, one of several ratings based on the game’s length, are female, according to Grid analysis of the Federation’s data. And of the 1,700 chess grandmasters — the highest title awarded by the International Chess Federation — only 39 are women.