An Editorial Melee About Female Gamers

SR71 writes "Tom's Hardware has a strong debate between two of its editors in a face-off editorial about female gamers." From the article: "I'm not being puritanical - heck, a while ago I wrote about wanting to see more sex in videogames. Neither is this about being against female gamers. I simply take issue with people falling and fawning over these female gamers, and talking high-mindedly about how professional female e-sports will soon be on a par with the male circuit." The article contans some crass language that may be NSFW.

Comments

NSFW

[JJMitchell]

Not to mention the first picture is fairly NSFW.

Re:OMG Sexism

[xero314]

Actually, in terms of reaction time, women are usually faster.

Scientific study does not seem to support your conclusion.
The Following is from the abstract of Gender differences in choice reaction time: evidence for differential strategies.

This study considered the hypothesis that on some tasks men and women might employ different information processing strategies...Results demonstrated a near-significant overall reaction time advantage for male participants.

The Following is taken from A Literature Review on Reaction Time by Robert J. Kosinski

in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003). Bellis (1933) reported that mean time to press a key in response to a light was 220 msec for males and 260 msec for females; for sound the difference was 190 msec (males) to 200 msec (females). In comparison, Engel (1972) reported a reaction time to sound of 227 msec (male) to 242 msec (female). Botwinick and Thompson (1966) found that almost all of the male-female difference was accounted for by the lag between the presentation of the stimulus and the beginning of muscle contraction. Muscle contraction times were the same for males and females. In a surprising finding, Szinnai et al. (2005) found that gradual dehydration (loss of 2.6% of body weight over a 7-day period) caused females to have lengthened choice reaction time, but males to have shortened choice reaction times. Adam et al. (1999) reported that males use a more complex strategy than females.

As you can see there have been plenty of studies on these topics. Males have a significant advantage when it comes to reaction time, even more so if they involve spatial location recognition.