On Monday the e-sports industry awards take place in London to applaud the top players in the business but not one female player has been nominated.
Competitive gaming, also known as Electronic Sports or e-sports, is growing at an incredible pace. In 2016, revenues from e-sports are predicted by professional services firm Deloitte to rise by 25% to $500m (£406m). Its regular global audience will likely top 150 million people.
Unlike in traditional sport, physical advantages in e-sports are non-existent yet the most popular games are still overwhelmingly played by men.
Recent research by the Pew Center shows men and women are equally likely to say they play video games but men are twice as likely to consider themselves "gamers". It is when gaming becomes competitive that the number of women playing drops dramatically.
Steph Harvey is one of the most successful gamers in the world. She says that the number of women in e-sports is as low as 5% and the main reason is the stereotype attached to gamers. "It's still a 'boy's club' so as a woman you're automatically judged for being different," she says.
Online abuse has been prevalent in the gaming community for years and even led to a misogynistic hate campaign.
Steph has even received online rape threats in the past: "The way I get harassed is about what they would do to my body, about why I don't deserve to be there because I use my sexuality - it's all extremely graphic."
[...] Julia Kiran is the leader of Team Secret, which in October became the top female team in the world. She thinks this reflects a common attitude: "It's always felt that female teams are not a real scene. Male players see us as a side game that doesn't count."
One of the solutions has been the creation of female teams and female-only tournaments.
(Score: 3, Informative) by helel on Wednesday November 23 2016, @08:14AM
Pew Research Center [pewinternet.org] has studied and men are (slightly) more likely to face harassment in video games then women. The big difference isn't in the amount of harassment received but in how it's perceived with respondents feeling like online gaming is more welcoming to men. By contrast the survey shows an impression that social networking is more welcoming to women but also that more women then men are harassed there.
So if everyone is equally hated in gaming why are professional players almost exclusively male? It might be that males are trained from a young age to keep their feelings inside and not show any response to things like name calling. If I had to place money on a reason, however, I'd place it on average reflex speeds [figshare.com] giving males an edge combined with greater male variability leading to more men then women at the very highest (and lowest) levels of play.