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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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...