Via Tyler Cowen an academic analysis of 1.4 million chess-tournament game records (pdf) by Christer Gerdes and Patrik Gränsmark shows that not only do men players tend to be less risk-averse than women but (emphasis mine)

A novel finding is that males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.

They said it here. (pdf) If you don’t like PDFs you can read the abstract at Marginal Revolution

There are surely dozens of conclusions to be drawn from that single sentence, and drawn with far more nuance and conviction upon reading the entire paper (which is blissfully available and free of charge.) But the most important conclusion I’d like to point out is that whatever origin you care to pick for it (patriarchy, sociobiology, misogyny, history, stereotypical chess-nerd unfamiliarity with the opposite sex or conversely more experience playing female opponents, some other reasons, and/or all of the above) gendered male aggression towards women diminishes male performance!

Specifically….

Interestingly, the estimate in column (5) shows that in cases where men are on objective grounds weaker players than their female opponents, their propensity to opt for an aggressive opening strategy seems to become even greater.18

This as opposed to men who are weaker players’ tendency to choose more risk-averse strategies when facing stronger players who are men. And lest this gender bias all seem 100% one-sided it’s important to note that weaker women players are also more likely to select aggressive strategies against women vs. men who are stronger players than they are.

Our results point at significant differences in risk taking across gender. Most notably, both men and women seem to change strategy when they face a female opponent.

The bottom line for me though is that no, really, “males choose more aggressive strategies when playing against female opponents even though such strategies reduce their winning probability.”

Why do male chess players choose to refrain from playing a solid game and opt for more aggressive strategies when they play against female opponents? Could it be rational to pursue a more aggressive strategy? In an attempt to find an answer, we investigate whether men have a greater winning probability when they use such a strategy in games where they face a female opponent. For a strategy to be seen as rational, we simply require that it should result in a higher probability of winning a game. For analytical clarity, it is desirable to use an unambiguous outcome measure, so here we only consider wins and losses, not draws. The results of estimations are shown in Table 7 where the outcome of the game (a win is coded as 1, a loss as 0) has been regressed on choosing a solid strategy, holding constant for other aspects, similar to the earlier regressions. We find that when a man plays against a woman, a solid strategy has a 1.5 percentage point higher probability of winning compared to not using such strategy. Our interpretation of these results is that, on average, it does appear irrational for males to opt for less solid strategies when they face a female opponent.

Recall that for economists “irrational” is equivalent to the slacker insult “loser.”

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Quick question: what do you think these economists propose for a possible mechanism. Would it be a “sociobiology” or “evolutionary psychology” hypothesis about some kind of zany male instinct to send pawn- or horsie-shaped white sperm proxies squirting across the board towards their female adversaries?

Well… no. In a footnote the authors specifically note that competitive behavior has more of a power component than a biological/sexual one.

On the importance of the position of women in society for competitive behavior see Gneezy et al (2009). In a field study of the Khasi tribe in India and the Maasai tribe in Tanzania, they found that in a society organized along matrilineal lines, like the Khasi tribe, women chose competitive schemes more often than the men in their tribe.

Demonstrating that indeed they are behavioral economists rather than sociobiologists they suggest if there’s any biological basis it’s the universal, non-gendered, and almost certainly evolved tendency for our human brains to save “bandwidth” by resorting to stereotyping, perhaps especially under pressure.

We are not in a position to provide a conclusive explanation for the latter result; however, some theories on stereotyping within the social psychological literature fit in nicely with our results. According to these studies “judgment can become more stereotypic under cognitive load,” (Macrae and Bodenhausen 2000, p. 105). Under the assumption that the “cognitive load” becomes greater when playing against a stronger player, gender stereotyping could be used as a “cognitive shortcut,” i.e. used as a means of processing information in a heuristic mode. As Hilton and von Hippel (1996) report, stereotyping can manifest itself through the selective judgment of evidence, for example regarding another person’s intelligence. Thus, stereotyping seems to be a plausible explanation for our findings, especially as we find the elevated aggressiveness against women not to be rewarding, i.e. irrational in economic terms.

The very good news? Biology we can’t do much about, at least in less than evolutionary time-scales. Stereotypes though? Yeah, well they’re tough too. We’ll never be rid of them (I mean, seriously, would you want to spend time consciously deciding whether each individual piece of red flat octagonal metal near a road meant “stop” this time too?) But we can change them. Not overnight, maybe, but unlike genetics we can change them in decades or even years, not generations.

All the better news if you’re a man too, right? Because the study suggests that right now if you’re a man your stereotypes and assumptions about women don’t just make you behave more aggressively (and thus less, um, endearingly) but also less competitively successful!

In other words you know all that anti-feminist claptrap about how “men are losing out to women?” Well yeah, turns out that’s true. The trick, though, is that if you’re losing it’s because you’ve fallen for other anti-feminist claptrap. How’s that been working for you?