Gender differences in performance under time constraint: Evidence from chess tournaments

The economic literature on time-pressured decisions is slim and has mainly relied on laboratory collected data. Within this literature, only few studies have investigated the gender differences in the effects of time constraint on decision making. The World Chess Federation reports the official player ratings in Standard, Rapid and Blitz Chess. Standard, Rapid, and Blitz Chess only differ from each other in the stringency of the time constraint they impose on the players. While Standard Chess can last several hours, Rapid (Blitz) Chess allocates each player (30) 10 min or less for the entire game. The present paper uses 2012 to 2019 chess tournament data of the World Chess Federation to investigate the gender differences in the effects of time constraint on performance. These data, containing more than 1.8 million individual observations, are analyzed using several approaches to ensure the robustness of the findings. The results indicate that the Rapid and Blitz ratings of female chess players are below the ratings of male chess players of the same skills. While female underperformance is largely robust even at the country level, its magnitude is rather small. Finally, reexamining the question by chess skill thresholds produces evidence that female underperformance is greater among the elite players. The findings are discussed in light of the past literature.