Women can't be bothered to play chess

At Pure Pedantry, Jake Young reviews a research paper by Christopher Chabris and Mark (not my cousin) Glickman entitled "Sex Differences in Intellectual Performance: Analysis of a Large Cohort of Competitive Chess Players." Mr. Young's post is a bit of a challenging read itself, so I didn't even try to read the research paper. However, the primary conclusion of the paper (as summarized by Young) is fairly interesting.

This data strongly argues that the difference in performance of women in chess is ... a problem of participation. The problem is not that women can't play chess well. The problem is that enough women who play chess well are not choosing to play chess.

Makes sense to me.