AMMAN — A post shared by the
Royal Jordanian Chess Foundation on Facebook regarding gender-based prize money differences at the Ramadan Open Chess Tournament triggered a flurry of activism on social media.
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The foundation set JD70 as the prize for first place male winners and JD60 for first place female winners, JD35 for boys under 14 years old, and JD25 for girls under 14 years old.
“I will not participate unless the prizes equalize. It’s absolutely shameful that the foundation degrades women like that,” Rana Ghassan, a student at
Jordan University for Science and Technology, commented.
The prize differences are not limited to Jordan or even the Middle East. The 2020 US Women’s Chess Championship set $25,000 as the prize for the first place winner, while the 2020 US Men’s Chess Championship set almost twice that, $40,000 for the first place winner.
Ghayda’a Alattar, winner of the Women’s Arab-African Individual Open Chess Championship in 2021, told
Jordan News that she understands people’s anger. “At first I was also shocked and mad of the prize gender differences, but when I started playing and competing, I realized it’s completely fair.”
“Chess is a male-dominated game; therefore, men have to compete with more people to rank up,” she explained. “If I had to compete with ten people to rank up, men have to compete with thirty, simply because there are more of them.”
“Men have to work harder and spend more time competing with more people in order to earn a title. In fact, females need 1,200 points to rank up while males need 1,500,” she added.
Alattar pointed out that there are open chess tournaments in which people from all ages, genders, and nationalities can compete, with fixed prize money, but it’s “smarter” to compete in a competition where a player is guaranteed to rank higher.
“A female chess player was the one who set the prizes,” claimed Chairman of the Royal Jordanian Chess Foundation Nawwaf Irshidat. “When I asked her ‘why are you undermining yourself by setting lower prizes for females’, she said that it’s internationally recognized that men get paid more in chess, because they work more and spend more time competing.”
“Personally, I would love it if both genders got paid the same,” he said. “Maybe that way we could encourage females to participate more.”
“In our foundation, males’ numbers are more than double the females’. Still, females bring us more titles and awards. Females concentrate more, and take it more seriously,” Irshidat said.
One chess spectator had a different explanation for the discrepancy. Mohammad Abu Alia, a 27 year-old activist and chess fan, said that chess is exactly like football. A member of the female’s team could be far better than the male’s team. Still, she’d get paid less because the women’s league gets less views” just as it does in chess, he said.
“I don’t think that males are smarter than females by any means. Chess started as a war tactic planner in a very political atmosphere, which are male-dominated fields. This might explain the reason behind the male dominance in the game,” he added.
Abu Alia also attributed male dominance in chess to the long-standing perception of women as weaker than or inferior to men. “I personally believe that parts of this stigma remained attached to sports, which explains the lower viewership of all female sports.”
Netflix drew international attention to the subject of
sexism in chess with the 2020 television show “The Queen’s Gambit”, which features a young female chess prodigy. The show, which became Netflix’s most-watched scripted miniseries, drew critical acclaim for its realistic portrayal of one woman competing in the overwhelmingly male-dominated field.
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