Chess is an interesting case study. For this whose don’t know, it’s not separated by gender, rather there are some competitions open only to women. At the same time, everyone knows Women’s GMs aren’t “real” GMs (they may even have killed off the Women’s GM title by now for this reason, I can’t remember), so it’s not clear that women’s chess isn’t at this point suggesting women are second class chess players. I’d expect women’s chess to disappear at some point (or for a few tournaments to stick around for historical reasons)–I’m pretty sure it’s less of a thing now than when I was a kid.

The value of women’s competitions is that it increases participation in sports where women were historically excluded (women were literally banned from FA football grounds in Britain) or where women’s participation was under-resourced (see… Little League softball, probably, which came into existence after a Supreme Court ruling saying Little League couldn’t bar girls from participating, so they made a separate competition to steer girls to). In some utopian future, that becomes unnecessary. However, over time, the women’s game sometimes develops a distinct flavor (men’s and women’s lacrosse require decidedly different skills, even if the difference in rules presumably originated in sexism) and then we have the problem of merging them back together without defaulting to losing the women’s game. There are sports where it wouldn’t be too hard–the ones where there’s little/no drift (shooting sports, maybe cricket) and the ones where everyone thinks the games are distinct (see baseball and fast pitch softball)–but others that are much harder. On the other hand, we manage with the fact there are two totally unrelated sports called “handball”, two lacrosse variants can’t be harder.