English Chess Forum

Is participation by juniors "progress"? If more kept playing when they got older, that would be progress, surely?

I am not arguing with what they measured, more what they are calling it.

England 74th, Scotland 93rd, Ireland 103 out of 105

Lots of work to do

Kevin Thurlow wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 28, 2023 1:19 pm

I am not arguing with what they measured

I am, I think it is nonsense. It appear that if you wish to be at the top of the table you need to do the following things.

Participation. Submit very few tournaments for FIDE rating, being sure to include any you can find with strong female participation. This will of course make your own FIDE ratings fairly meaningless.

Progress. This is easy, you send all the promising girls you can find and then select the same number of boys, leaving the rest of the talented boys at home. Job done!

Performance. This is strange, because bringing more female players into the lower levels might be expected to reduce the average rating. Perhaps if the higher rated men could be persuaded to stop playing...

By the way, my efforts to look more closely into this have been hampered by the fact the M/F flag which used appear by the names of players in search lists seems to be yet another bit of FRS that has fallen off.

NickFaulks wrote: ↑

Tue Nov 28, 2023 3:10 pm

Progress. This is easy, you send all the promising girls you can find and then select the same number of boys, leaving the rest of the talented boys at home. Job done!

Many poorer Federations already do this, because free accommodation and food is only provided to one player in each division in world youth events. So 50/50 (or near) gender splits are quite common without any devious intent.

So choosing this metric as a proxy for progress is weird, to say the least.

Looking beyond the tables there were some interesting information in the report which people may or may not agree with, but most of these seem sensible and probably deserve more focus than the tables?

The first theme was the representation of women in leadership and executive roles in the federation.
The second theme related to resources, such as equal funding for representative teams, and prize-money in tournaments.
The third theme related to quotas, such as mandating at least one female player in each team in national chess leagues.
The final theme was having strong female role models and mentors within the federation’s chess community.

Not always easy to do these things in chess, but listening to federations who have done better than others is normally a good start?

The report has far more information from the Countries and is well worth a read. Where we can do better is far more important than picking holes in the metrics?