I'm *very* surprised that there are only 702 men that run the 100
meters faster than the fastest woman. Where did you find this
statistic and if we throw out the highest rated woman - like you did
with polgar, how many men are faster than the 2nd fastest woman? I
think the womans world record is 10.49 held by Flo Jo. She is now
dead so obviously shoudln't count. The record before she set that was
10.77 and I do not believe any other woman ever broke 10.60. In our
state track meets we will have high school boys running under 10.6 and
occasionally under 10.49. At the college level the difference is even
more pronounced. Am i right in assuming the question is how many men
have run faster than the fastest time of any living woman in the
world? I can't imagine there would only be 702 men with better times
than whatever the fastest womans time is.

I think the difference in chess has nothing to do with creativity and
the supposed lack of it in women. I think the answer lies more along
the lines of why don't women like to watch football as much as men and
why don't they want gift certificates to radio shack etc.

I hate to generalize but I think we can say that if you *really* don't
care whether you can beat so and so at chess you probably won't work
as hard as others. I'm not sure why but most of the women I know
*really* do not care who they can beat at chess. The men in general
often put some (albeit a slight amount) weight to it.



(Peter van der Hoog) wrote in message . com...
"Bob Musicant" wrote in message news:Vm0eb.6679

This doesn't surprise me. When the subject is chess, just chess,
Fischer
tends to display real character. He was a bit of a hotheaded youth in
1962. He is enough of a realist in these matters to know when he is wrong.

There is something very strange in respect of women performance in
chess, compared with other sports. When you look at the best result of
women in athletics and compare those results with men:

100 mtr : Best women on Men ranking list: 702
800 mtr : Best women on Men ranking list: 576
1500 mtr: Best women on Men ranking list: 529
Chess : Best women on gen.ranking list: 601 (Stefanova, Antoaneta)

As you can see women performance in chess compared to male chess is
exactly consistent with other sports!

Why is that? I can't think of any logical explanation. Oh yes, I
excluded Judith Polgar, because she indeed is truly and utterly a
complete exception to the rule.

Kasparov's assessment that creativity is required for top chess and
women lack creativity I find total nonsense. What's so special about
being the first one to discover something? I don't think that thought
process is different from discovering something for the second time.
Karpov never invented something new in chess and he was for years the
best chessplayer around. Peter van der Hoog