Greek female chess players are quietly making history in international championships. This time, an 11-year-old girl, who has been playing chess since she was 4, was crowned world champion at the World School Chess Championships, which ended in Rhodes.
Evangelia Siskou competed in the category of girls up to 13 years old, achieving 7.5 points in 9 matches, i.e. seven wins, one loss and one draw, in matches where a total of 34 female chess players took part.
In fact, a few months ago, in November 2022, she had won the third place in the World Championship for Girls up to 10 years old.
In an earlier interview with Marie Claire, Maria Pesetidis, a chess player who had tied with Kasparov, answered the question "As a woman, have you faced discrimination in chess?"
"Because it is also a martial sport, a type of combat, it is considered preeminently masculine. This is why boys are more attracted to chess – girls tend, traditionally, to gravitate towards more artistic pursuits.
"Of course the reasons why girls are a minority have nothing to do with intelligence, they are purely social. In fact, until the beginning of the twentieth century, they did not accept women in the tournaments. The first to be accepted was world champion Vera Menczyk in 1921.
"Motherhood is also a key factor: many of my teammates stopped playing chess early, when they had a child and devoted themselves to family. Chess requires tremendous dedication and a lot of time – say, ten hours a day, when we are talking about championships.
"Because it is also a martial sport, a type of combat, it is considered preeminently masculine. This is why boys are more attracted to chess – girls tend, traditionally, to gravitate towards more artistic pursuits.
"Of course the reasons why girls are in the minority have nothing to do with intelligence, they are purely social.
"But there is also the term women's chess, as they usually call passive chess, the closed game, in which you do not attack - by which someone means that women play like chickens!
"I remember coaches teaching women chess with a lot of defense, resulting in female chess players not crossing the middle of the board. Personally, fortunately, because I played very aggressively from a young age, I didn't face this discrimination to a great extent."
READ MORE: Billiards: A historic FIRST gold medal for Greece at the European Tripoint National Team Championship.
