Participation gap doesn’t explain performance gap

When cognitive scientist Wei Ji Ma recently claimed that the lower performance of women could be fully explained by their lower participation rate in competitive chess based on an analysis of rating data of Indian players, it was a hit on Twitter. Computer scientist José Camacho Collados has applied the same analysis on ratings from 20 countries and found that India was an outlier, while in 18 countries the performance gap is significantly bigger than expected based on the percentage of female players.