“It is a party after all!” I hear someone shout as they walk over to the speaker and crank up the volume, the sound of Chappell Roan’s voice filling the room while I pour myself another glass of prosecco.

 

    Welcome to the one-year anniversary party for the Women’s Chess Club of St Pete, where 14 women are gathered around chess boards talking, laughing, and drinking wine while casually engaged in battle on the boards before us. It is so much fun, and such a change from where we began a year earlier. If we were to wind the tape back to our first meetup on January 15th, 2025, you’d see a quiet room with a few strangers sitting around, hesitantly moving pieces around the boards. Some of those strangers would come back, and some wouldn’t. But since that day we’ve had about 30 new faces walk through our doors, with over 20 current active club members. What started as an organic get-together has turned into a formal club with board members, regularly scheduled activities, and a sustained community.

 

    Before our club got started, there were very few women coming into the St Pete Chess Club (SPCC), where we host our monthly meetups. I know this because I have been the only adult woman registered in almost all of the 40 USCF-rated tournaments I’ve played at the SPCC over the last few years. Oftentimes there are young girls there, but occasionally there are none and I am quite literally the only woman in the room. My experience at the club’s casual chess nights was the same, except there weren’t even young girls in the room; just me. 

 

    This is not surprising since, as of 2020, less than 13% of USCF members were female, and the majority of them were children or teenagers. Professional streamer and content creator Anna Cramling has openly acknowledged how lonely it is being a woman in the chess community. I have often felt the same way.

 

    Despite this, a lot of people see a chess room full of men and leap to the conclusion that women aren’t showing up because they either don’t like competition or aren’t as smart as men. Neither of these conclusions are true; what is true is that the story of modern chess is not kind to women, and the community remains deeply antagonistic to our presence today. Knowing this, I decided to change things by creating a new space. In the early days of 2025, I walked into the SPCC and asked the President, Timotey Gospodinov, if I could use the location to host a women’s chess meetup at the club. He was on board immediately. 

 

    Because women generally don’t want to spend time in a room where they aren’t wanted, I had to create a room where they are wanted. In starting the women’s chess club, my singular goal was to create and maintain a space that feels safe. Safe to ask questions, safe to lose a game, safe to be vulnerable. Safe to show up. That focus is what drove the initial energy and purpose of the club. Once safety was established, we were able to shift the active focus of the club and start to prioritize having fun! That’s it. Safety and fun. These two values are what have driven everything we’ve done and everything we continue to do. Our club activities include our monthly meetups, our actively running group chat, our casual weekend learning lab, which members volunteer to host and lead, and the other group events we’ve organized outside of chess such as trivia, karaoke, and happy hour, among other things. At the time of this writing, we are in the process of planning a women’s club watch party for “Queen of Chess,” the documentary about Judit Polgár that’s being released on Netflix on February 6th.

 

    As the Women’s Chess Club of St Pete has demonstrated, there is so much opportunity to bring women into the chess community! And every club should want more female members, for the same reasons they want more players in general: to strengthen the community, create a more welcoming environment, increase diversity of playing skill and style, foster learning and growth, improve the club’s financial stability, and increase the love of the game. As the old adage goes, the more, the merrier! 

 

    And the best part is that everyone in the chess community can contribute to making it happen. Women like Vera Menchik, the Polgár sisters, and so many others have spent the last century laying the foundation for the path forward. Now it’s on us to continue building on their efforts and achievements by making our local spaces safer and more fun. By creating more women-only spaces, promoting more women to leadership roles, and adding events to the calendar that do more than focus solely on rating points and competition, we can actively create chess spaces that draw women in. And we should do that because, contrary to popular belief or assumption, women want to show up and play.

 

    Bringing more women on board doesn’t have to feel like a big task. In considering options and next steps, how can we think like chess players and consider our candidate moves? Does the position call for swinging the queen across the board for a dramatic fork check? Or does it call for a subtle but meaningful improving move, like a quiet pawn push? The truth is that both moves have value; any step that increases safety and fun over the board is meaningful progress, benefiting not only women but the entire chess community. Join us in building it.

 

- Sharlene Morris, President and Founder, WCCSP