This was the year that I, a lapsed chess fan, rediscovered my love for the game. You can’t fault my timing, for 2018’s World Chess Championship match between defending Magnus Carlsen and the challenger Fabiano Caruana is shaping up to be a close one. Yet my excitement (yes, chess can be exciting) is somewhat dulled by the continued lack of female representation at the world championship. The tournament is technically open to all, but not once in its 132-year history has the competition been won by a woman (though Judit Polgar competed in 2005).

So why aren’t women qualifying? Many have turned to pseudo-scientific arguments about the “fundamental differences” between the male and female brain. The chess.com online forums are full of commentators (whom one must assume all work as neuroscientists when they’re not playing chess) offering up their own examples of biological reasons for the gender discrepancy. Men are more analytical and women more emotional; women lack drive and stamina; they have a lower IQ; and, my personal favourite, women can’t handle a game that doesn’t depend on forging strong interpersonal connections.

More concerning is the realisation that these unproven arguments are not confined to the niche world of online chess communities. High-ranking male chess players have a long history of making disparaging and misogynistic remarks about women and chess. Bobby Fischer, in what would turn out be one of his tamer offensive opinions, suggested in a 1963 interview that women were terrible chess players because “they’re not so smart”. Half a century later the men are still at it, with British grandmaster Nigel Short arguing in 2015 that women are simply not “hardwired” to play chess.

The real reason behind the absence of a female world champion, however, has less to do with crude biological reductionism than simple statistical science. A recent study has argued that the dearth of women in top chess tournaments is to be expected, given the gender disparity in participation at all levels of the game.

The authors analysed the population of about 120,000 players active in a single country, with a ratio of male to female participants of 16:1. Their findings highlighted that 96% of the difference in ability between genders could be explained by the fact that extreme values from a large sample are likely to be far larger than those from a small one. In other words, there have been more men represented at the world championship because more men play chess. This, in turn, means that a higher number are bound to reach the skill level of Carlsen and Caruana.

If – then – we want to see a woman win the World Chess Championship, we first must address the lack of female participation in the game. The reasons behind this are complex, and likely manifold, but let us focus here on just one: the lack of prominent female chess players.

Chess champion Hou Yifan in Lviv, Ukraine. Photograph: Pavlo Palamarchuk/AP

There are no real female role models for young girls, even though women have been playing chess for a really long time (the first official Women’s World Chess Championship, for instance, was held in 1927). There are, of course, female players who have been recognised for their outstanding skill, such as the Polgar sisters and the current women’s number one, Hou Yifan. Yet these women aren’t assigned the same level of importance within chess’s historical narrative as men such as José Capablanca, Garry Kasparov, Fischer and Carlsen. As all the “heroes” of chess are men, women are taught from an early age to associate good chess with being male.

If we have any hope of addressing this, we need to raise the public profile of female chess players. Alongside the news features on Carlsen, we need to run one on Hou. We need to cover the Women’s World Chess Championship with the same fervour as the “main” world championship – or at the very least we need to, you know, actually cover it.

Some women have already made attempts to address the discrepancy in media coverage and to raise the profile of female chess players. Take, for instance, the Chilean chess player and musician Juga, who is currently releasing music exploring her identity and experiences as a woman in chess. By branching out, she is able to both boost her reputation within the traditional community as well as drawing attention to female players among audiences who have had less exposure to the world of chess tournaments. It seems that this may be just the time to bring about the endgame of male-dominated chess.

• Alisha Matthewson-Grand is a music journalist