Xjyuk

In chess you don't need to be physically strong, well you need some kind of endurance, but is it the real reason why there are no super strong women gms?

Yes I know about Hou Yifan and Judit Polgar, but they aren't even close to being world champion.

I understand that there are a lot more men chess players then women, but how many women are in top 100? Even the disproportionate number of players can't explain this.

What is the reason then? Can we deduce that men are smarter than women or we shall conclude that there are more geniuses among men then geniuses among women?

Women played chess as much as men did for a while until the beginning of the 17th century. At this time, chess rules changed in that the queen and bishop gained much more significance and power in the game. Chess became a more competitive sport, not just a casual game among the wealthy.

Chess went from a leisurely game played between lords and ladies to a cut-throat competitive sport played in public houses and cafés, and therefore considered an unseemly activity for women.

For the next 300 years, society continually sent the message of "chess is not for women."

The reason there are no women super grandmasters (players at the top) is because there are hardly any girls signing up to start playing chess anymore.

For further reading, read this article about why only two of the world's top 100 chess players are women

I don't know a lot about chess or even gender differences in cognition, but I do know enough that chess involves certain aspects of cognition and that there are gender differences in cognitive ability. For your question, about the number of super GMs, the average abilities of men and women is more or less irrelevant. You need to look at the tails of abilities. Again, there are differences in the tails: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289610000346 Men are better (both on average and at the extremes) for some abilities and worse at others. Women tend to excel at verbal and social cognition well men excel at spatial aspects of cognition.

In addition to cognitive differences, men and women react different to competition and my guess is you cannot be a super GM with a strong competitive side. There are also social and cultural differences between men and women. Even if there were equal numbers of recreational players, that doesn't mean there would be equal numbers of competitive players (or similar rates of individuals willing to dedicate their lives to chess).

The popularity of competitive chess may well stem from its emphasis on male dominated traits (i.e., spatial cognition) and it's lack of emphasis on verbal and social cognition.