New research may answer why women struggle in esports, gaming

The question of whether women are actually worse at competitive video games than men has long been debated, and more recently it has been formally studied, with an early outlook that shows cultural factors are more to blame than anything else for any meaningful difference in performance in competitive gaming and esports.

The Alienware and Team Liquid Pro Lab is a “dedicated, collaborative and multi-year project…with the goal of setting a new standard for how esports athletes train.” Headed by one of the top esports organizations in the world in Team Liquid, it has access to some of esports’ most successful talents. It also sponsors women both as streamers and as esports competitors.

This allows the lab to study differences between men and women in competitive gaming in a way few can. Some early findings have already been published, largely discussing reaction time differences across multiple games. Part of this was an analysis of the differences between men and women and the suggestion that cultural and social factors can cause women to struggle to succeed in top-level esports.

Are women worse at competitive video games than men?

It’s true that women have generally struggled to find success, or even representation, in high-level competitive gaming, but the explanation for this difference in success is potentially complicated.

There have been just a handful of women who have found their way to titles in major esports. Traditional sports have long divided the genders due to physical differences between men and women. While size and strength confer few or no benefits in competitive gaming, women remain an extremely small minority at the highest levels of play. This is despite most major esports leagues permitting women to compete alongside men.

Certain esports tournament organizers and game publishers organize separate women’s leagues. When women’s teams compete against men’s teams, as seen in some Counter-Strike events, the results overwhelmingly favor men’s teams.

This discrepancy between male and female competitive gamers has been the subject of much speculation. The Alienware and Team Liquid Pro Lab discussed this phenomenon when describing its findings on reaction times.

Why are women worse than men at video games?

Research suggests that the environment and culture of online video games may reinforce both a lack of participation and development among women who play. While findings show that men and women in competitive gaming had comparable reaction times, women were less accurate and suffered a greater impact to their performance after making a mistake.

“Within the FPS players tested, however, there was a notable split between male players and female players. We found that female players had comparable reaction times when it came to wrong cues, but they had lower accuracy, and a more difficult time recovering from and letting go of mistakes,” Team Liquid said in its report.

But what’s the cause of this? The lab speculates that women in gaming have been conditioned to experience greater anxiety regarding their in-game mistakes. This stems from the more extreme reactions and increased toxicity that women face relative to men while playing games online.

“Female players may have developed a higher sensitivity to and awareness of their own mistakes…there is some evidence that anxious individuals show impaired ability to disengage attention from threatening stimuli. Whilst making a mistake isn’t exactly a ‘threat,’ this is the most likely explanation for why there was such a strong gender divide in the result,” the report said.

While there have been wide-ranging theories regarding possible physical differences that may disadvantage women in competitive games and esports, this research does not mention any such difference. The fact that women had comparable reaction times may indicate that there is no such difference at all, and that the separation between men and women in competitive results is indeed more a result of cultural factors.

Regardless, culture is undoubtedly a factor in the lack of women competing, or finding success, in top-level esports. There are numerous esports that are turn-based, which don’t have any sort of execution requirements. Even if there was a physical difference that handicapped women somehow, this discrepancy wouldn’t apply to turn-based games like Hearthstone, Pokemon, or Teamfight Tactics. Despite this, the overwhelming majority of competitors in each of these games are men.