The Boy-Girl Puzzle

 They wanted to test the chess strength of American high school students so they asked 2 high schools, ones that operated decent chess clubs, in each state to send their 2 top players to the tournament. When the entries all arrived, someone noticed that they seemed to be all boys. While this wasn't surprising by any means, the starkness of the girl-less roster was too harsh and flew in the face of statistics - that about 9% of high school chess players were girls.  To align the tournament with statistics, they went to all girls schools that sported chess clubs and finally found 18 girls willing to play in the tournament. When the tournament was over, it was noted that all the top prizes went to boys. Two girls had slightly better than average results, two had average results and the other fourteen hovered near the bottom of the list.

The organizers scratched their collective heads. 

Finally someone spoke the unspoken, "If girls comprised 10% of the total, why weren't their results representative of their involvement? Rather than being so lop-sided towards the bottom, their spread should be in a natural bell-curve distribution - but it's not!"

"Why is this so?" they asked themselves and each other.

"Perhaps it's because their brain mass is lighter," one suggested.

"Maybe, it's for the same reasons boys out-distance them in Math and that girls are simply better in the softer verbal areas while boys are better in the hard sciences" wondered another one aloud.

"Do you think it's how they are wired?" queried a third.

"I believe it's some social dynamic exerting itself," spouted another erudtely.

"Well, there must be some reason," they all agreed and though they came up with all sorts of reasonable sounding excuses, they really never could agree on one as the main culprit. However they all concurred that girls just don't play as good as boys.

[the above is fiction]