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Esports are the fastest growing spectator sport in the world. This year over $63 million in prize money will be up for grabs, there will be over 2,000 tournaments and over 9,000 active players.
Bwin have created an algorithm which ranks the world’s most successful players, based on a number of criteria. Surprise, surprise, they are all men. If you look at Esports earnings you’ll see that the top earner is Peter Dager from the US, who has netted $2,618,120. Compare that with top female earner Sasha Hostyn, also from the US, her earnings total $141,775. That puts her at number 286 in the overall earnings rankings.
There’s a couple of other striking differences worth noting. The top ten female earners are comprised of seven Americans, two Canadians and one Brit. The games they are playing are Star Craft 2, Dead or Alive, Halo and Counterstrike. The top male earners are dominated by Chinese players, are there Chinese women players out there too? And then there’s the game: the top fifty-six male gamers are all winning their money playing Dota 2, because that is of course where the big money is.
So what’s going on? Research suggests that women make up 52% of the gaming population, but of course we are talking about gaming in its widest sense rather than the Esports variety. Even so, if women are interested in gaming and clearly they are, why aren’t there successful female Esports teams? Why aren’t talented female players being recruited to play alongside males in top teams. Esport is a field of play in which the physical barriers of conventional sport don’t exist. Women should be able to compete with men on equal terms shouldn’t they?
Are there differences between male and female brains which mean that males are simply better at Esports? Or is it rather that the games are designed by males for males? The history of computing is pretty patriarchal, Ada Lovelace excepted, computers have always been marketed at men by men and the marketing strategies for Esports continue to target twenty-one to thirty-four-year-old males. Or is it that the male gaming community is so hostile toward female gamers that the majority are put off competitive gaming long before they get anywhere near high level competition?
Female gamers are exposed to a level of scrutiny and hostility, often sexualised, that male gamers simply don’t have to endure. When women do reach high levels of achievement in games you can be sure that they’ll be a barrage of accusations about cheating or fraud. In response to this hostile environment, women have ghettoised in women only events scattered through the year and once again we have a situation where female competitors are seen as inferior and inherently less interesting than their male counterparts. The solution? Time. Gaming is in its patriarchal first phase, but it will evolve. Women will play a greater role in game design and female gamers will develop the expertise to take on the best players in the world.
