Statistics are not inherently perfect. They completely ignore things like the environment, hostility towards women in the chess world, and do so on. Correlation

Statistics are not inherently perfect. They completely ignore things like the environment, hostility towards women in the chess world, and do so on. Correlation is not causation and all that. The reality is that orders of magnitude more men play chess than women do. Not that men are inherently smarter. As more women play chess, we'll see a more even distribution of rankings.