In the same year as the Summers gaffe, researchers Paul Irwing and Richard Lynn published a paper concluding that “different proportions of men and women with high IQs…may go some way to explain the greater numbers of men achieving distinctions of various kinds for which a high IQ is required, such as chess Grandmasters, Fields medalists for mathematics, Nobel prize winners, and the like.” Defenders cast him as a martyr to ivory-tower pieties critics charged that his speculation was, at the very least, obnoxious in the absence of hard evidence.Ĭhess isn’t an academic discipline, but like STEM fields its gender imbalance is often attributed to differences in analytical, spatial, and calculation skills-in short, intellectual disparities. Summers’ suggestion, in 2005, that gaps in “intrinsic aptitude” might explain the gender gap in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math) plunged him in deepening controversy until his resignation as president of Harvard the following year. The theories in question are now linked forever in the public mind with Larry Summers. Study its implications and you start to smell checkmate. Most of us can only dream of being so right about something.Īnd while it is only an anecdote-no conclusive proof of anything-it drives some recent theories of group cognitive inequality into a tight corner. She blitzed to the forefront of a game at which women were considered hopeless, exactly as her parents had envisioned before she started playing. She became, for a brief spell, the greatest chess prodigy in human history. She beat the best human player of all time.
But Judit became one of the top ten players on the planet. If the Polgárs’ experiment had been even a little less successful-if all three daughters had “only” become masters, or if one had become an obscure grandmaster while the others lost interest-you might call it a fluke, or evidence of a ceiling for female chess players. Even fewer declare, and make good on, their intent to raise a certain type of genius. But how many such families could there be? Few Western parents coach their toddler daughters relentlessly in anything, let alone chess. Is Judit the rare successful product of an experiment at which other families fail in obscurity? Maybe. Was there a genetic component at work? Possibly-but Klara was a nonplayer, László an average talent whom Judit could beat by age five. The Polgárs’ story is more than inspiring: it’s the most remarkable “nature vs. As an adult she racked up victories against the likes of Boris Spassky, Magnus Carlsen, and Garry Kasparov, who had once declared that “women by their nature are not exceptional chess players.” At her peak she was ranked No. At age 15 she became the youngest player ever to reach grandmaster status. The second child, Zsófia (Sofia), became an International Master. In 1991 Zsuzsa (Susan) became the first female grandmaster in the history of the sport. With the help of elite coaches, the Polgárs drilled their daughters in the art of chess.
Accordingly, we reject any kind of discrimination in this respect.” Chess is a form of intellectual activity…. “Women are able,” László insisted, “to achieve results similar, in fields of intellectual activities, to of men. But László and Klara Polgár scorned the received wisdom. Top-level chess had long been considered a domain in which women were mentally incapable of competing. When the eldest took an interest in his chessboard as a toddler, László realized the game-with its objective measures of success-would make an ideal test of his method. The author of a brassy parenting book called Bring Up Genius!, he sought to prove that, as one of his kids later put it, “any healthy child-if taught early and intensively-can be brought up to be exceptionally successful in any field.” He married a fellow teacher who shared his views, and together they had three daughters. In the late 1960s, a Hungarian teacher named László Polgár resolved to try an educational experiment.
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