Should women be paid the same or more as men?
Naysayers may forget that POGchamps showed there is serious demand for ALL levels of chess.
The women's section helps make tournaments great. I for one enjoy the fighting spirit, and don't understand why there isn't equal compensation.
Norway Chess pays women the same as men. I think they are the first major tournament to do so, and I imagine this is where the sport is heading.
My only curiousity, as to why I am posting, is if the forum agrees unanimously or not, and if there is a great argument for paying women less.
Poll is anonymous.
11 Replies
Intelligence is intelligence. Pay them equally.
Extroardinarily profound insight. There is unique and beautiful ferocity just as well as the men's games.
If you can't find the love of war in women's chess you're probably just not that intelligent.
Each game plays a roll in a world championship battle.
Asking women to carry the weight of the world for less pay is just hideous to me. I rest my case!
Skills is skills
Best is best
You think the same for woman basketball or we should focus on markets demands and earnings ?
Should a world champion ranked at 25-2600 elo (?) be as profitable as a world champion ranked at 27-2800 elo ?
Sounds to me the road is pretty different to reach the top .
But then again you are a Lebron fan (lowest EC ever during LeBron reign to reach finals…😉 so I guess u lean on equal pay :p .
FWIW if there is no difference between man and woman , supposedly its a just a gender things , and there is no physical advantage coming into play between the 2 in chess , why having a woman title anymore ?
Are we focusing on equality or not ?
It’s like yeah they are equal but you know let’s not treat them like they are equal ?
It’s like let’s not apply market laws , nature law (sex) , competition law ( woman in chess aren’t the « real best chess players ») etc to promote an utopia of equal gender ( not saying it’s right or wrong ).
I don’t know but I don’t see how aiming at outcomes equality is something that should be aim in competition shrug .
Depends on the job
In sports specifically, men get paid more because more people are watching.
In business/office jobs, salaries should be equal.
There are other professions where women earn more than men. Modeling is an example.
Chess doesn't have men's and women's events. It has open events and women's events. If a woman is capable of running with the top men at the 2700 level, she can and will be able to compete with them in elite events and get paid the same as they do.
We've just only ever had one woman who could: Judit Polgar, who broke Bobby Fischer's then-record for the youngest ever Grandmaster. in 1991. Her peak rating was 2735. In July 2005 that put her #8 in the world. She was only 9 points behind Vladimir Kramnik who at the time held half of the split world championship.
That year she played in the Candidates, unfortunately scoring only 4.5 out of 14. But she made it there, to the second-biggest stage in chess. Had she won the tournament, she would have been deemed FIDE champion, which would have resulted in her playing against Kramnik to reunify the title.
Women's-only events are lesser, just like the titles require lower ratings to achieve, because the entire point of Women's Chess is to be accessible to women and girls who historically not been groomed for chess so much as men and boys are. Fewer women play chess, meaning the talent pool of top women's chess is shallower, so we don't get as deep into the tails of the bell curve as we do with the men. It's not that women can't play chess as well as men can. It's that they don't do it, yet, but by offering Women's Chess titles and tournaments, we hope more women will.
If you try to force women's sections to pay the same prize pools as open sections, tournaments will just stop having women's sections. There is less interest because it's a lesser standard of play.
Don't ruin women's chess by mistaking what it's for.
"If a woman is capable of running with the top men at the 2700 level"
Neil, what century do you suspect this will happen?
"If a woman is capable of running with the top men at the 2700 level"
Neil, what century do you suspect this will happen?
Judit Polgar already did it, as I elaborated in the post. I expect it'll happen again in the next 20 years.
Consider this: the FIDE women's champion from 1962-1978, Nona Gaprindashvili, was the first woman to make International Master and the first to earn a GM norm. Susan Polgar (Judit's older sister) was the first to earn a GM title through the conventional norms + rating process, doing so in 1991. Previous women made GM were awarded because of tournaments, titles, and lifetime achievements.
These days the top players in women's tournaments have routinely earned the GM title on the conventional path.
The strategy of getting women INTO chess, and then letting top talent develop organically, is working. The Polgars were a fluke, but they were also the trailblazers.
No one in any vocation 'should' be paid more, less, or equal to any other person. It's not about should. People 'should' be paid as much as they can negotiate for. If society was for some reason addicted to watching women playing chess, then I'd expect women would make more than men playing chess. Society's obsession with people being paid exactly the same on the basis of gender for niche vocations that 0.00000000001% of the population hold is a societal absurdity.
