![]() ![]() ![]() As a purely statistical matter, you would expect few, if any, women at the extremes of the rankings. Much of this gap stems from how many women compete, versus the number of men who do: around sixteen per cent of tournament players identify as female, and most of them are children. Still, of the seventeen hundred and thirty-two Grandmasters in the world, just thirty-eight are women. Men and women face one another on equal terms, and no one can tell the gender of a player from the moves on a scorecard. The second-ranked woman, Aleksandra Goryachkina, a Russian in her early twenties, is outside the top two hundred.Ĭhess is not like basketball or soccer. She is the only woman among the hundred best chess players in the world, at No. She speaks English quickly and precisely she spent a year at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, studying public policy. “Teachers never shaped my views in that way.” These days, her hair falls to her shoulders, and black cat’s-eye glasses frame her face. (Last year, at twenty-six, she became the youngest full professor in the university’s history.) “My parents never taught me that as a girl you should do this or that,” she said. ![]() “I never felt restrictions or limitations,” she told me recently, from her home in Shenzhen, China, where she is a professor at Shenzhen University’s Faculty of Physical Education. Thirteen years after she became a Grandmaster, at the age of fourteen, people still mention the two big barrettes that used to pin back her bobbed hair. It wasn’t so much the way she played the game-dynamically but not dazzlingly, with an aggressive but flexible style. Even by the standards of chess prodigies, Hou Yifan stood out. ![]()
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