The meteoric rise of the TV series The Queen’s Gambit brought women in chess to the forefront of cultural discussion—but did you know that it wasn’t all that long ago that women were largely excluded from the sport?
Here are some surprising facts about the history of women in chess!
Fighting to compete
Today, chess tournaments are open to both men and women, but it wasn’t always this way. In fact, women were commonly restricted from joining chess clubs or competing alongside men until the early 1900s.
During previous centuries, European noblewomen were welcome to play chess amongst themselves or at court, but they were forbidden from engaging with men more formally. (By default most chess clubs in Europe and the U.S. were for men only, until the 1900s!) The inaugural Women’s World Chess Championship was held in 1927—almost 50 years after the first World Chess Championship in 1886.
The first woman to compete alongside men on a world-class level was Vera Menchik, a Russian-born Czech-English chess player. She also became the first women’s world champion! She continued to dominate women’s chess for 17 years until her untimely death at the age of 38, as the result of a German air raid on London in World War II.
But that doesn’t mean the glass ceiling was shattered once and for all. In 1977, male participants in the Indian National Championship rallied together to petition the Indian national chess organization to block a woman, Rohini Khadilkar, from competing in the open tournament. She had to appeal to the president of the world chess federation, Max Euwe, in order to successfully compete.
Drawing women to the sport
In the world chess federation (FIDE) rating list, women comprise about 11% of all rated players. That’s 58,488 women versus over 473,000 men!
There are many reasons for the gender gap in chess. Women frequently encounter significant obstacles in the chess world, from a lack of psychological and financial support, to having to face prejudice and biases, to pressure to drop out.
Cultural and societal factors can certainly play a large part. Researchers have noted that while boys and girls participate on a more equal standing in early childhood, female participation drops rapidly as age increases and children reach adulthood. (Not so different from the data on girls and math, too!)
Women in chess as a family tradition
Some have tried to argue that biological differences may be behind the gender gap—but the story of the Polgár sisters strongly contradicts this. A Hungarian psychologist named László Polgár set up an experiment within his own family, deciding to raise his 3 daughters immersed in chess.
The results were remarkable! One daughter, Judit Polgár, became the greatest female chess player of all time. Another, Susan Polgár, became the Women’s World Champion, and the third daughter, Sofia Polgár, attained the titles of International Master and Woman Grandmaster.
Our Duolingo Chess course also has a special family connection to women in chess! Elisa Camps Troncoso is a Senior Learning Designer on the chess team, and she hails from a long line of women chess players: Her great-aunt Aída Camps Rosales not only won multiple Mexican Women’s National Championships but also pioneered women’s chess in Mexico. She even led the country’s first teams at Women’s Chess Olympiads!
Women at the highest level: Grandmasters
There are currently 1,879 Grandmasters—and among those are only 44 women.
The first woman to attain the title of chess Grandmaster was Nona Gaprindashvili in 1978. As of January 2026, women comprise just over 2% of all Grandmasters… and this percentage has increased over time!
Because of this extremely low male-female ratio, the global chess federation (FIDE) gradually created women-only titles beginning in the 1950s, hoping to encourage female participation.
However, somewhat controversially, these women-only titles have significantly lower qualification thresholds than the general titles. For example, the women-only titles use a necessary rating 200 points lower than the general titles. This 200-point rating difference means that the likelihood of a Woman Grandmaster with the minimum rating beating a regular Grandmaster with the minimum rating is less than 25%.
Even with these reduced requirements, only 339 women hold the title of Woman Grandmaster. But there’s hope: Within the U.S. Chess Federation, female membership has increased by 70% since 2009, so we expect the number of Women Grandmasters—and Grandmasters who are women, too—to grow! 💪
Long live the queen(s) 👑
So next time you sit down for a game of chess, remember—watch out for the queen!