Elisabeth Pähtz has been playing chess since she was a child. Her father Thomas Pähtz was a tournament chess player in the GDR and is a chess grandmaster himself. From an early age he trained Pähtz and her brother, who was two years his senior. Pähtz won her first German championship at the age of nine and the first German women’s championship at the age of 14. While her brother embarked on a professorial career, Pähtz stayed on. The reason: prize money. “Of course it’s a pretty cool thing as a teenager,” she says on “Die Boss”, “that I earned my own money without being on my parents’ pockets. That was a very good feeling.”
However, the 38-year-old does not see herself as a high-flyer. “It has nothing to do with brilliance, but simply with the ability to concentrate, energy level and variant calculation,” she tells “Die Boss” host Simone Menne in an interview. The fact that there are far fewer successful women in chess than men can be explained statistically. The proportion of women in chess is less than ten percent worldwide. Consequently, there are more successful chess players than women.
This is also reflected in the funding. Their male teammates would have received three times as much subsidies for travel and hotel costs as the women. “I left the national team in 2019 because I was fed up with these inequalities,” she says. As a result, the funds were largely adjusted. Produces tutorials teaching chess to others.
Pähtz also speaks about the allegations of cheating by world champion Magnus Carlsen against his competitor Hans Niemann, which have been the subject of heated debate in the chess world since last summer. In this episode of “Die Boss” you will learn how easy it is to cheat at chess, what sex toys have to do with it and why chess is a high-performance sport.
At “The Boss – Power is Female” top women speak among themselves: hostess and multi-board member Simone Menne (BMW, Deutsche Post DHL, Henkel, among others) meets female bosses from all areas of society to talk to them about their lives and careers. “Die Boss” appears fortnightly on Wednesdays on stern.de and the stern YouTube channel as well as on RTL and all common podcast platforms.
