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Re: Why I Supported The Motion For Womens CFC Titles
The idea is to keep the strong women and girls in chess a little longer so that they can act as examples and inspiration to younger girls. I doubt that there is a chess coach/teacher in Canada who has a higher proportion of girls in his classes than I do and have had. At times we have had as many or more girls than boys in our advanced classes and those girls give no quarter nor do they expect any when playing boys or adults.
Recently we have seen more girls showing interest. Part of that is the fact that we had three girls who went to WYCC and had lots of favourable press and radio coverage in 2011. Kids in my beginner class ask me about Lily Zhou, Rachel Tao and Jeannie Zhang because they heard of them in the newspaper or from their friends at school. Last year at the Windsor Chess Challenge after the games were all done a bunch of boys were treating one of our girls Erica like a rock star because she had just gone 8-0 against the boys in her group.
In beginner classes the boys actively discourage the girls. They also do it to the other boys but the other boys aren't affected as much. I have also seen cases where female siblings of male players are discouraged from pursuing this interest even if they display as much talent as the boy or in some cases even more. If you have one girl in a beginners class pretty soon you will have no girls. If you start with two girls quite often you will soon have three or four girls as they tell their friends.
When the boys tell the girls that girls can't play chess I tell them that yes they can. I might show a game from one of the Polgar sisters or another woman that holds the grandmaster title. That usually dulls the anti-girl campaign for a while anyway.
Some of the most vociferous opponents of this measure on chesstalk and elsewhere are relatively young men. I am reminded of Alfalfa and Spanky calling to order the meeting of the he man woman haters club. Of course the club falls on hard times when Darla approaches Alfalfa but that is another story.
Originally posted by Michael Yip
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Recently we have seen more girls showing interest. Part of that is the fact that we had three girls who went to WYCC and had lots of favourable press and radio coverage in 2011. Kids in my beginner class ask me about Lily Zhou, Rachel Tao and Jeannie Zhang because they heard of them in the newspaper or from their friends at school. Last year at the Windsor Chess Challenge after the games were all done a bunch of boys were treating one of our girls Erica like a rock star because she had just gone 8-0 against the boys in her group.
In beginner classes the boys actively discourage the girls. They also do it to the other boys but the other boys aren't affected as much. I have also seen cases where female siblings of male players are discouraged from pursuing this interest even if they display as much talent as the boy or in some cases even more. If you have one girl in a beginners class pretty soon you will have no girls. If you start with two girls quite often you will soon have three or four girls as they tell their friends.
When the boys tell the girls that girls can't play chess I tell them that yes they can. I might show a game from one of the Polgar sisters or another woman that holds the grandmaster title. That usually dulls the anti-girl campaign for a while anyway.
Some of the most vociferous opponents of this measure on chesstalk and elsewhere are relatively young men. I am reminded of Alfalfa and Spanky calling to order the meeting of the he man woman haters club. Of course the club falls on hard times when Darla approaches Alfalfa but that is another story.
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