During episode 156 of The Simple Man Podcast, BJJ black belt Ethan Crelinsten started a discussion about gender and chess. This led to Simple Man coach Damien Anderson questioning why chess, a game devoid of physicality, maintains separate divisions for men and women.
“Why separate men and women in a mental game? There’s no like physicality involved.”
Nick Rodriguez responded:
“They’re too slow to hit the timer,”
followed by quips from Crelinsten about making sandwiches and washing dishes. But Rodriguez pressed further, suggesting that the key difference might not be intelligence but decision-making speed:
“Like the best IQ, or is it the ability to make decisions because that matters. Like, you have a high IQ, but uh, you make decisions fairly slow.”
He implied that slower decision-making could explain why women’s chess competitions remain separate from men’s.
The conversation taps into a larger historical narrative about gender and chess.
Hungarian psychologist Laszlo Polgar famously challenged assumptions about innate intellectual differences between men and women. He systematically trained his daughters, including Judit Polgar, to excel in chess from a young age. In 1991, Judit became the youngest player at the time to achieve the title of Grandmaster, at just 15 years and 4 months, breaking the 33-year-old record held by former world champion Bobby Fischer. She is the only woman to have defeated a reigning world number one player and has beaten eleven current or former world champions in either rapid or classical chess: Magnus Carlsen, Anatoly Karpov, Garry Kasparov, Vladimir Kramnik, Boris Spassky, Vasily Smyslov, Veselin Topalov, Viswanathan Anand, Ruslan Ponomariov, Alexander Khalifman, and Rustam Kasimdzhanov.
Polgar’s work also highlighted the social barriers women face in chess. Historically, female participation was limited and opportunities for competition were sparse, contributing to the perception of a performance gap.
Even today, stories emerge showing how these barriers persist. In Kenya, a male player disguised himself as a woman to compete in women’s chess tournaments, and cleaned house. He was only found out because he was winning a lot and nobody had heard of him in a relatively small pool of competitors.
Science suggests that, on average, men and women may differ in areas like spatial reasoning and decision-making speed, but these differences are small and heavily shaped by experience and opportunity. Historically, women were actively discouraged from both intellectual and physical competitions, which has influenced the overall competitive landscape.
Chess is no exception. Separate divisions were introduced to encourage female participation in a male-dominated field, not solely because of innate cognitive differences. Similarly, in sports, women are often best compared with other women, as physiological differences can strongly influence performance outcomes.
Rodriguez’s remarks may be provocative, but they open the door to an important conversation: women in chess, like in other sports and intellectual arenas, often face obstacles beyond raw ability. Hearing a BJJ academy owner make assumptions about women’s mental capabilities also sheds light on why there isn’t a burgeoning female competitive scene in BJJ within his team.
