Female poker geek anonymous

I can't take it anymore. My e-mail inbox is overflowing this last few days from angry women, facebook posts criticizing Larry Summers, skype jokes from fellow women physics PhDs. What set it off? This New York Times article published yesterday. It is based on an article based on SAT/ACT tests for the highest 0.01 percentile of the population, especially the 19(!) that scored perfect scores as 7th graders. It actually has the audacity to suggest that while in the broad mean girls/women have the same skills and aptitudes as boys/men in math and science, when it comes to the best (and the worst) men actually excel; a sort of fattening of the tails. Hey, women aren't getting better since like 15-20 years ago, the pace at which they have been accepted to faculty positions, have gotten prestigious grants, medals, prizes whatever has flattened. Not dropped, just that the gender gap hasn't become smaller.

I've heard a lot of that in poker, too. Annette Obrestadt was quoted (and she said almost misquoted on Pokerroad) on saying: "I've always said that girls suck at poker. I say that because they do. Maybe they just aren't as competitive and don't try to learn from their mistakes. But I don't want them to get better. I like the uneven playing field." There is a huge gender gap in poker, obviously and of course a skill gap. Nobody has ever said that overall men have better potential skill in poker than women, just that women aren't either interested or discouraged by society to play poker and that's why the gap exists.

But many people have suggested that even under the best circumstances the top 0.01 percent of men would still have better innate abilities than the top 0.01 percent of women. In the world series far less women cash and win events than their starting percentages would indicate, although it's often a small number statistics game and any 3-4 wins would skew the statistic back to its "normal" pace ("Year of the Woman" anybody? sheesh).

Something like a numbers gene that prevents us women, even while being really good of ever being THE BEST. Yes Jen Harman can play the big game, but she'll never be compared to Phil Ivey. Yeah, sure a few women can bink some tourney wins, but never will we see a woman win 10 bracelets, yadda yadda. Never will a woman win a Field's Medal.

And to that I say: ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME!?!?!?! The only thing I might conclude from that article is that the distribution of that tail for males is definitely broader on the stupid side, grrr. Tierney is a moron and anybody claiming that women's innate ability to play poker is lower than men's, might want to find me at a low limit HULHE table sometime, please (low limit means that I don't think that anybody has >3BB/100 edge over me, the rake).

Fortunately there are plenty of other articles that prove the opposite, that gender gap is driven by social factors, not biological differences, link
see also from International Math Olympiad studies that the US is behind other countries in sending women to the Math Olympiad due to cultural reasons, link
I have been to the International Math Olympiad and can confirm that it is a sausagefest extremely similar to a gathering of the best online poker players (not gonna say more ;-) )

Now to the other part of the article... Should we encourage women to get better in the STEM fields and better at poker? Should we organize more girls science camps? More women events? Everything to narrow the gender gap and make women feel welcomed?

Here is where I will probably veer off the PC route and say NO. I mean, yeah, definitely get rid of the boulders society puts into our way to becoming good at "numbers". We don't need: "tools = boys, cooking set = girls" labels or only women models and not women players advertising for poker sites. But to artificially introduce something because we need to bring in more women to our field, nah. There was a funny comment on the NYT site "let's narrow the gender gap for everything, start with prisons" hehe. Dude, if you're into poker, you're into poker, whatever. If you're into knitting, you're into knitting.

So what do I think about Ladies' Events? Belittling, denigrating, demeaning. And don't let me get started on the attitude the organizers have to ladies' events ("let's make space for all these beautiful ladies"; see Jen Newell's post here a year ago, I was in that event and felt like that, too)

Why the hell am I playing the ladies' event then? Because I like my tables as soft as possible, of course and I'll leave it at that (also because that's what I can afford, lol). But I'd rather they'd be gone with it and not artificially create poker interest. Oh, and if a man (TT, @_tizzle) wants to play a ladies' event, let him, it'll expose the sham that these things are!

tl;dr: Women aren't stupid, sometimes it just doesn't interest them.