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E-Sports Gender Gap: 90+% Male
An anonymous reader writes "An e-sports production company has published the results of a survey into the demographics of the gamers who attend competition events. Even though nearly half of the gaming population is composed of women, they account for less than 10% of the players in competitions. The e-sports company, WellPlayed, said, '[A] whopping 90-94% of the viewers were male, and interestingly enough, only about half of the remaining survey takers felt comfortable being identified as female.' The results were taken from survey responses over the past year at competitions for StarCraft 2 and League of Legends. DailyDot makes the point that competitive gaming communities also tend not to be racially diverse. Quoting: 'Although no studies have been done about race in esports, it only takes one trip to a Major League Gaming event to confirm what Cannon says. With the notably racially diverse exception of the fighting-game community, Asians and white Americans make up an enormous portion of esports players and fans. Black and Middle Eastern esports fans are conspicuously missing.'"
Wonderful. Another story based on the assumption that absolutely everyone should be absolutely equally interested in absolutely everything.
*Shock* *amazement* they're not. Unless the venue is telling women, black people, and Middle Eastern people they're not allowed in the door, there is no story here.
Oh and if women are uncomfortable identifying themselves as female, maybe it's because stories like this keep making it into a Great Big Deal. Maybe they just want to be a person and not *OMFG A WOMAN IS HERE!* all the time.
Well, according to the "equality of outcome" school of thinking that dominates progressive thinking and policies, this amounts to racism. Therefore, the government must intervene in order to restore the preferred state, namely a statistically representative distribution of all genders and races.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
Men and women are not equal in everything, regardless of what people may want to belief. There are differences in physical and mental capabilities, career inclinations and aspirations and a lot of other physical and psychological traits. Trying to conform men to women behavior and women to men behavior is a violence our political society tries to do to people, is ironically comparable to what it did in the past trying to make homosexual people straight.
In this day and age, where laws do not only grant equality of rights, but try to enforce equality of results, whenever there is a gender gap it is because it is part of what makes us different and the freer we get to choose the greater the gender gap will become. In a general manner, social gaps that can be closed by force are social gaps that should not be closed.
You know, sports like football are just games too, only not not software-assisted.
E-Sport is a real thing with wide use, yes. There's quite a bit of money involved as well, depending on which game.
Video games are called e-sports when played in a professional setting, in organized tournaments etc.
WellPlayed, said, '[A] whopping 90-94% of the viewers were male, and interestingly enough, only about half of the remaining survey takers felt comfortable being identified as female.'
If half the remaining survey takers didn't reveal their sex (assuming this is in fact what is meant by the above), how can one profess to know they are female?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
My first instinct was to think that the competitive nature of e-sports would be more likely to attract men than women, as men are "naturally" more competitive when playing games, while women (in my experience) tend to play games either to socialize or relax. It is a very broad brush to paint the two sexes with, but as we are basically looking at a sub-section of men (those who are interested in playing or watching e-sports) versus an entire gender (women, specifically why are there not more of them playing/watching e-sports) any comparisons are going to be a bit disingenuous.
However, I suspect that a large percentage of people who chose not to declare their gender in the survey are doing so out of a sense of privacy, rather than a desire to hide the "fact" that they are women... unless they are also attending the venue where the survey is taken while wearing androgynous clothing designed to mask their gender, and expect to be pounced on like an antelope surrounded by a pack of hungry lions if there is even a hint of femininity (disturbingly, that is probably not far from the truth in some cases).
Calling it just a video game takes away the legitimacy of it as a activity in a professional setting. I agree they aren't athletics, but they are certainly sports.
E-sports are organised and played by professionals, depending on which game they make their entire living from playing and sponsorships (eg. many Starcraft players).
The problem with saying "half of gamers are female" is in how you identify someone as a "gamer." If you identify someone who plays phone games but doesn't own a console and hasn't purchased a AAA game since they left high school as a "gamer," you're not going to be pulling from the same pool as people who would be interested in actually playing StarCraft II or League of Legends competitively. For the purposes of identifying the gender game in e-sports, those casual gamers are not "gamers." And if that means that the pool of available players shifts to something like 75% male (I have no idea if this is true or not, this is entirely a hypothetical), then the gender gap does not appear *as* bad (but obviously would still exist). And if that means the pool shifts to 90% male, then the gender game as it applies to e-sports basically does not exist, because the gender gap in e-sports would be a result of the gender game in competitive games in general, and not an e-sports specific problem.
I have to disagree.
When the competitors have to train harder than real sports athletes and have shorter shelf lives than Olympic athletes, it is a real sport.
E-sports simply is more competitive, and shows of far more impressive, super-human, skill than its RL analogue.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Black and Middle Eastern esports fans are conspicuously missing.
Hispanics make up 17% of the US population and aren't mentioned at all. What's up with that?
Those of Middle Eastern ancestry make up .42% of the US population. That would be 4 people at a 1000 person convention. The small percentage makes it very easy to skew the over/under representation.
Cost of entry. Even as a white dude with a decent income, hockey is one of the few things that is off the table for my kids, because it's just too expensive. The amount of training that people put their kids through in Hockey in unlike any sport out there. You won't see kids who only ever played on an outdoor rink making it into the professional leagues. 20 years ago, that might have happened. But parents now spend thousands of dollars per year putting their kids in training camps, travelling leagues, and all other sorts of expensive endeavors, making the sport completely inaccessible to low income families, and even middle income families who don't want to devote all their resources to the sport.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
That's because testosterone makes us competitive and aggressive where as most women find a lot of games pointless. That is THE reason, this isn't a problem, this isn't sexism, and this isn't an article worth reading. The end.
The porn industry has some amazingly sexist statistics. It's a very sexist industry. Something needs to be done about that!! We have to encourage more women to enjoy watching porn and more men to engage in producing it. Yeah... equality in all business and recreation. That's the ticket!
http://psychology.wichita.edu/...
The numbers pretty much match up. This is simply a gender based preference. Argument that "women play more but are discriminated against in competitive scene" which is what these claims usually push appears to be patently false - the issue is that women are simply not interested in comeptitive gaming, preferring cooperative gaming instead.
But women do not, in 90% of the cases, play Starcraft.
Also, I think you should research more into darts, snooker, etc. In more sports like this Women are allowed to complete in male tournaments (the male leagues are actually unisex), they just are not able to actually win or qualify. Hand-eye coordination is a physical ability, and tends to have huge gender based differences. The real professional athletes know this, as they actually follow the sport. We have decades of hard data on this, and do you think professional women athlete never interact with their male peers? The only people who think that women and men should compete in the same leagues are people who do not even watch the sports they are suggesting be changed.
There is not a single sport that I know of that women and men actually compete at the same level at. They are different in every single way (their brains are wired more differentially than their physical bodies are), so they do better or worse based on these differences in every sport out there.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
(Except the North American Starcraft champion and arguably best player outside Korea)
I love watching nature. The female deer come out every spring and engage in these amazing head-butting fights to see who will win the docile males. Or something like that.
Of course, there are exceptions to behavior patterns among individuals. But facts are facts, and male (not-equals) female.
Hunting is considered a sport, but you normally can't lose (I haven't seen a deer with a rifle yet). Even hunting game that can hunt back, the game plays with a pretty heavy handicap. Generally you either win, or you drink beer in the woods for a few hours and go home, which maybe is also a win.
Fishing is considered a sport, very similar to hunting. The odds are stacked heavily in your favor.
Hang-gliding and skydiving are considered sports, but there's no competition whatever. I suppose winning is defined as landing softly enough to live.
What is a "sport" is in the eye of the beholder.
I think that's a generalization that's dangerous, particularly when this is done based on percentage of a self-selecting subset of a population. I know very few grown men who play CoD or that ilk, and actively hate those games and the people who play them (and generalize as such!). I think there's even a brogaming hate website out there or two. Similarly Angry Birds didn't get popular from women alone, it's a pretty popular game. So what's the breakdown?
The statistics are this, 47% of gamers are female, 60% of female gamers are more or less exclusive mobile gamers. That leaves quite a large population of women on consoles and PCs. Such that 30% of the gaming population is female and playing on platforms that are eSports friendly. They are either not playing those games, they are playing but not competitively, or they are concealing their gender. Given that black and middle eastern men are definitely also playing games, but are not identifying, may suggest that concealing ones background is advantageous in the eSports arena.
This isn't surprising, competition tends to bring out the absolute worst in personalities. Look at football, in 2014 a guy admits to being gay, brouhaha ensues. Certainly there are other gay men in football, but they're on the DL.
Regardless, the dictionary definition of "sport" does include eSports, as well as Hunting, Fishing, Bowling and even Golf. eSports, to me, seems to fit a second meaning of sport, i.e. "mockery", better than any of the other definitions, but that's the eye of the beholder part.
Of course most sports playing in a "sporting" way, tend to have totally lost the original definition of the word "sport", that is to cause mirth and enjoyment. Very few competitive sports do that, most of the time. I find the people who play them are there for the 5% of the time something awesome happens, and suffer the other 95%.
You very well might be, I do not follow darts.
But from what I understand from Wikipedia there is nothing stopping them from enrolling in mens tournaments. And I find it hard to believe that their never existed a woman darter who wanted to be the universal world champion.
"although no restrictions on women competing against men [exist]."
And for example, I did find this excerpt for some dart world records, separated by gender (http://www.sentex.net/~pmartin/patdarts/guinness.htm).
Which shows gender having a huge difference.
"MEN (8 players) 1,722,249 by Broken Hill Darts Club in New South Wales, Australia on September 28-29, 1985."
"WOMEN (8 players) 744,439 by a team from the Lord Clyde in Leyton, London on October 13-14, 1990."
Maybe you mean than in amateur darts, women are as good as men? Because I also found a few conversations of actual fans who follow both gender's tournaments bemoaning how unskilled the women are compared to the men.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Women don't score as well as men in darts. In the BDO darts finals, only once in the last 20 years have either of the male finalists averaged less than the best ever women's average in a final, and that was last year. Only once has a male finalist averaged less than 80, and that was Leighton Rees losing in a whitewash back in 1979 - Anastasia Dobromyslova won the woman's final in 2009 with an average of 73.95. Men regularly average over 90 in the finals, which has never been achieved by a woman.
Where did you get the idea women were as good as men at darts?
"Hunting is considered a sport, but you normally can't lose (I haven't seen a deer with a rifle yet)."
A deer perhaps not, but there have been cases where a hunter got shot by his own dog.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/do...
I suspect that if a female were out there that could really play well in e-sports, her gender would not only not be a disadvantage, but a serious advantage as far as attracting sponsors and attention. Look at Danica Patrick. Do you think she would be making as much in sponsorship deals if she were a guy with the same record? Shit, she was getting huge endorsement deals before she had even won a single race. A women who can compete head-to-head with guys in just about *any* sport is going to be CELEBRATED, not discouraged.
Look, in e-sports, if someone is good and wants to play, they're going to rise to the top. The notion that there are scores of women out there who are secretly great players, but too meek to enter competitions because they're afraid of some player insulting them, is not only ridiculous, it's insulting to women. Your thesis is that women must be treated special because they're too frail and weak to hang with men, and shrink like violets the first time some guy calls them a name in a game. I don't buy that for a second. They're not at the competitions because they don't want to be. And trying to get them there by force is not only insulting to them and their choice, but it's also going to increase resentment among the male players who'll then see them as affirmative-action newbs who didn't earn their way there like everyone else had to.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
"A deer perhaps not, ..."
Sorry I was too fast. A guy named Clarence Gerkin achieved that goal and was actually shot by a deer.
http://news.google.com/newspap...
What I want to know is, what are we going to do about the absence of Asian people in professional basketball!
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Actually, I was wrong. There are actually leagues in America which only allow Asians to join, and there was an attempt at a white one (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-American_Basketball_Alliance_(2010)).
And I would not worry too much legally. There are thousands of women/black clubs. It is not like I could try to go to enter a Domestic Violence center, be denied, and sue them out of existence; And similarly for some group that specifically caters to blacks. You are right, you could never create a white only basketball league in this political climate, but you could create an Asian only one, and have no trouble (and if their are sports that Blacks suck at, they could create their own leagues without much trouble).
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
If you are talking about Scarlett, she doesn't count, because we don't have a very complete grasp of the underlying reasons for the gender gap. Therefore, we must allow for the possibility that genetics plays a role. She may be socially female, but biologically male. God, I'm going to get a lot of flak for this one.