Stalemate: Girls and a mixed-gender chess club

This article draws on research which sought to determine why boys came to dominate, and ultimately claim as their own, a mixed-gender chess club established within an Australian government primary school, located in a white, upper middle-class, eastern suburb of Melbourne. A qualitative methodological approach was used, utilising semi-structured and informal individual and group discussions, in conjunction with observations of the chess club 'in action'. The 18 girls who participated in the study ranged in age from 7 to 12 years. The study was interpreted from a feminist perspective, which maintains a concern regarding the ways that schooling, in this arguably enlightened age of gender awareness, continues to transmit and reinforce inequalities between the sexes, albeit in more subtle and less overt forms than in the past.