Social Screening and Cooperation Among Expert Chess Players

This paper studies cooperation and social screening among expert chess players. It employs a large international panel dataset with controls for fixed effects, age, sex, nationality and playing strength where the latter accounts for productivity differences. With a female share below 15 percent both sexes screen women by cooperating more with men, especially professionals. With a female share above 15 percent, women cooperate more with women. Countrymen cooperate more than players of different nationalities, and language and geographic proximity also affect cooperation. The paper gives support to quota-based admission of women and minority groups in intellectually demanding professions.