Fourteen of the nation’s top young chess masters came to New York this week for an elite clinic at the Marshall Chess Club. Four of them were girls. For proponents of gender parity in chess, this was progress.

At a front table, as several boys yelled out answers to a chess puzzle, Carissa Yip, 12, handed a yellow paper to the instructor, Greg Shahade. “You wrote down one move,” Mr. Shahade said. “That’s it?”

Carissa, who at age 11 became the youngest American girl ever to attain the rank of master, did not blink. “It’s a brilliant move,” she deadpanned. “You’re so needy.”

It is one of the vexing questions in chess: Why, in a sport where physical differences do not matter, are boys and men so much more prominent than their female counterparts, despite efforts to attract more girls and women?