Women in chess

This article is about the participation of women in chess and its culture.
Women's chess competitions.
The majority of chess tournaments are open to all participants regardless of gender. On the calendar of international tournaments, very few if any are restricted to men; but a few are restricted to women, most prominently the Women's World Chess Championship and the Women's Chess Olympiad. The World Junior Chess Championship and World Youth Chess Championship also include concurrent girls' championships in various age divisions. Some countries hold, in addition to the national championship, a separate women's national championship.
The first Women's World Chess Championship was held in 1927 and won by Vera Menchik. The current champion is Ju Wenjun, but the higher rated Hou Yifan, after winning the championship three times, has declined to participate since 2016.
Women in chess coaching.
In 2010, as the head coach for the Texas Tech Knight Raiders chess team, Susan Polgar became the first woman to lead a men's Division I chess team to the Final Four. In April 2011 the Texas Tech Knight Raiders won the President's Cup; this made Polgar the first female head coach to lead a men's Division I chess team to the national title.
Gender differences in chess achievement.
One woman, Judit Polgár (generally considered the strongest female chess player ever), was at one time the tenth highest rated chess player in the world. Three women, Maia Chiburdanidze, Judit Polgár, and Hou Yifan, have been ranked in the world's top 100 players.
Analysis of rating statistics of German players in an article from 2009 by Merim Bilalić, Kieran Smallbone, Peter McLeod, and Fernand Gobet indicated that although the highest-rated men were stronger than the highest-rated women, the difference (usually more than 200 rating points) was largely accounted for by the relatively smaller pool of women players (only one-sixteenth of rated German players were women). In 2020, psychologist and neuroscientist Wei Ji Ma summarized the state of research on women in chess as "there is currently zero evidence for biological differences in chess ability between the genders" but added "that does not mean that there are "certainly" no such differences."
Culture.
Margret the Adroit may have made the 12th-century Lewis chessmen. In 2010 at a conference at the National Museum of Scotland on the Lewis chessmen, Gudmundur Thorarinsson (a civil engineer and a former member of the Icelandic Parliament) and Einar S. Einarsson (a former president of Visa Iceland and a friend of the chess champion Bobby Fischer) argued that Margret the Adroit made them. It is a claim that the American author Nancy Marie Brown supports in her 2015 book, "Ivory Vikings, the Mystery of the Most Famous Chessmen in the World and the Woman Who Made Them".
Historically chess has had many variants. In chess today the Queen is the name of the most powerful chess piece. There is a cultural story of how and why chess changed to recognize this piece as female.
History of women in chess.
In the Middle Ages, Macalda di Scaletta played chess, and historical evidence suggests that she was probably the first person in Sicily who learned how to play it.
Queen Elizabeth I, who lived from 1533 until 1603, played chess very well, according to a placard in the Tower of London.
Benjamin Franklin, who lived from 1706 until 1790, according to Thomas Jefferson played chess in Paris with socially important women, including the Duchess of Bourbon Bathilde d'Orléans, who was "a chess player of about his force".
In 1884 the first women's chess tournament was held; it was sponsored by the Sussex Chess Association.
In 1897 the first women’s international chess tournament was held, which Mary Rudge won.
In 1927 the first Women's World Chess Championship was held, which Vera Menchik won.
In 1950 Lyudmila Rudenko became the first female International Master.
The first Women’s Chess Olympiad was held in 1957 and won by the Soviet Union team.
In 1976 Rohini Khadilkar became the first female to compete in the Indian Men's Championship. Her involvement in a male competition caused a furore that necessitated a successful appeal to the High Court and caused the World Chess Federation president, Max Euwe, to rule that women cannot be barred from national and international championships.
In 1978 Nona Gaprindashvili became the first female Grandmaster.
In 1996 Judit Polgár became the first woman to be ranked in the top ten of all chess players, in 2002 she became the first female chess player to defeat the reigning world number one (Garry Kasparov) in a game, and in 2005 she became the first female player to play for a small-scale World Chess Championship, which she did in the FIDE World Chess Championship 2005; she had previously participated in large, 100+ player knockout tournaments for the world championship, but this was a small 8-player invitational.
Recently, Hou Yifan has been the leading female chess player, for example winning the Biel GM tournament in 2017.
In all, three women, Maia Chiburdanidze, Judit Polgar, and Hou Yifan, have been ranked in the world's top 100 players.