Quote Originally Posted by Lissou View Post
It's a complex issue (the reason for female-only chess, not the recent thing about excluding trans women while also excluding trans men, that's just plain stupid). Girls aren't really encouraged to pursue chess. When they do it's often despite everyone rather than with their support. Then they go through hoops and are told every step of the way that they don't belong. So many of them don't make it as far as men do. And those who do have to deal with decades of receiving less support and less encouragement than they would have as boys. Then the enter tournaments and because of the discrepancy they have basically zero chance getting a title. Like, the best female player right now is ranked behind over 100 men.

So they created female-only tournaments to try and encourage women, tell they it's okay for them to play chess too, that they're welcome, that they can do it in a place where they won't have to deal with sexist remarks and so on. But those don't get as much funding, don't get as much attention, and so the whole thing gets perpetuated in a different way. It becomes a "lesser tournament" if you will. And you're in a position where female players can join the open tournament and know there probably won't get anywhere or join the female tournament and get titles that people won't respect much.

Any solution needs to make changes that are so big, we can't just hope for them to happen but they would cost a fortune to implement by "force". I mean it's basically the definition of the long-lasting consequences of a systemic discrimination even once we try to fix said discrimination.

So long story short, that's why there are separate tournaments and it's difficult to know if it's helping or hurting in the long run.
Incidentally this is why there's practically any gendered sports at all. Thanks for explaining it very well!