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If the author's conclusions in this article are accurate, then males
would
also be better at chess variants. Chess is chess, until it isn't. (How
many would recognize this game as a shatranj variant?
http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/1178742/some-impressions-after-playing-the-battle-of-macys)

However, I would take issue with at least some of the conclusions in the
article. The last 2 paragraphs of the article are:
"Males on average may have some innate advantages in developing chess
skill due to previous differing evolutionary pressures on the sexes.
Females may have greater talent on average in other domains, however. If
the male predominance in chess was due just to social factors it should
have greatly lessened or disappeared by now. Indeed, some researchers now
recognize that many psychological sex differences are due to complex
interactions between nature and nurture.

This conclusion is unpalatable to many but it is best to acknowledge how
the world actually is."

The idea that social factors are now balanced between men and women is a
stretch, one I do not agree with. I believe it's been demonstrated that
if
there is a difference between men and women in any area, a good part of
that difference *is* social conditioning. Encouragement and discouragement
in children is often quite subtle, and recent studies of films of classes,
for example, show this clearly. You want 2 kids who read the same to read
completely differently 5 years from now. Tell one kid (s)he is a good
reader and the other (s)he is a bad reader. Sometimes that's all it takes
to turn 2 average readers into non-average readers. If that isn't enough,
give the "good" reader encouragement and somewhat harder and harder
books
to read, and ask them what they liked and didn't like, and what they
learned.Give the "bad" reader very simple kids books to read, with
orders
to write book reports on them. Keep it up for a year, and see what happens
several years further on. Any bets?

I do not claim men and women are equal in everything, as that is obviously
wrong. I do not even claim that the difference shown in the article isn't
real. What I do claim is that the author never analyzed the male players
the way the female players were analyzed. Suppose only the top 5% of all
chessplaying men go on to get better, and the top 50% of women do. What
would that do to the conclusions? We know that women are discouraged from
things like chess, and men are encouraged to play things like chess, on
average. Finally, the little matter of sexual harassment also has a
bearing. Based on studies of women, any that rise are subjected to more
intense, more open, and more hidden harassment. In fact, you can see that
in the news, if you look. Just 1 example, the Gov. Christie bridge-closing
scandal was blamed entirely on a woman working directly for Christie by
the
lawyers Christie hired to "investigate". It seems she was having an
affair with another Christie top gun, and he dumped her, leaving her to
close the bridge in a fit of irrational female passion - all her fault,
because she was jilted.