> Has a titled "Grandmaster" female beat a "Grandmaster" male yet?
I'd be surprised if it hasn't happened. According to the International Chess Federation (http://www.fide.com), the top woman is Yifan Hou, who has a rating of 2658 and is 88th on the top 100 persons list. The 100th on that list is Maxime Lagarde (male) who has a rating of 2651. That's pretty close to being equal, but if the ratings predict as they should, if they played a game she'd be a little more likely to win.
> Is their a cognitive difference that gives a man an advantage?
Possibly. Been a while since my school days, but from what I recall the intelligence distributions for men and women are about the same, except at the extremes. In two groups of, say, ten million people -- one group men, the other women -- where none suffer from brain damage from birth defects or other organic causes, there will be about the same numbers of average persons, of dimwits, of fairly bright people, and so on. But at the extremes there are more males. In those groups there will be more super-duper-bright men than women ... and also more super-duper-stupid men than women.
> In the 1990's I have read that neurologist have cited that men are better at "moving 3d objects in their head" better or something like that.
Yeah, I remember that from school too. IIRC the theory was that the difference went back to our primordial hunter-gatherer days. Men did more roaming about, tracking woolly mammoths and such, and by necessity evolved a better spatial sense than women so they could find their way home.
> Is this just male scientist bias/bullshit?
Doubtful. The days when scientists were all male are long gone and have been for decades. Intelligence, neuroscience, etc wasn't what I worked on in grad school but was a closely allied field, enough so that I knew several grad students who were working on those things. That was in the late 1980s. About half those grad students were women.
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trevorh321 (5495)
4 years ago
It should be noted that while half of graduates in the sciences and engineering fields are female, it is because that has been socially engineered. They want more women to graduate and that makes it not only easier to get into these schools but to graduate, too. It makes them all look better. It does not mean they make equal or better scientists or engineers.
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