I’m a woman, and my initial reaction to women’s titles was the same as yours. It’s condescending at best (just in my opinion) to have the women’s titles have less rating requirement then the “men’s” - as many have said though, nothing stops a woman from obtaining these titles. It definitely implies women are not smart enough to achieve the regular grandmaster title.

However, I do feel there is importance to it. You need to make chess welcoming to women in some sort of way, because the truth is is that there has been little else done in the history of chess to encourage women to play. Even today with several very prominent chess streamers being women, chess is very much still a boy’s club. The older generations (in my personal experience not many people millennial age and below still think this) seem to have this false belief that women are instinctually uninterested in chess, which is obviously untrue and stems from misogyny full stop. Women are less likely to play chess simply because of gender roles that have reinforced what men and women are “supposed” to be interested in for hundreds and hundreds of years, and these titles were an attempt to change this. Was it the perfect solution? No. Is it condescending? Yes. But I don’t think it’s something we need to do away with at the moment. These are just my personal feelings.