’Just for Boys’: Girls & Gaming in the 21st Century

The world of gaming, whether it be PC, console or handheld devices, has never been more popular - you’d be pushed to find someone who doesn’t spend at least a few hours each week playing a digital game of some sort, even if it’s a smartphone app like Candy Crush!

I wanted to talk about what some of you may consider a bit of a niche area - pro gaming.

It’s become really popular over the last decade & some are making millions from competing in e-sports contests with other gamers and streaming online. 

However, what you will notice is there is an unfortunate lack of women in this space. 

Statistics show that on balance, the ratio of male to female gamers is pretty much equal, and in line with the population too - with the percentage of female gamers in the UK alone being estimated to be around 42%, UKIE found in a 2015 survey.

So why are the numbers of women in professional gaming so low? 

Well, misogyny in the community is one reason - we too often see women in gaming sexualised, belittled and essentially treated as less than for competing with men.

This is not only disencouraging but alienating for female gamers - it tells us we don’t belong in the gaming community, so our lack of existence in the professional sphere is no surprise. The amount of women even daring to refer to themselves as ‘gamers’ is incredibly low - in the US, just 9% of women aged 18-29 who game, compared with 33% of men the same age. 

Articles often suggest women just aren’t interested in gaming, but the figures show that there’s plenty of women playing every type of game - so it becomes more a question of why female gamers aren’t given the attention and media interest that make gamers are.  

What’s more frustrating is there wasn’t a single woman in the top 300 of earners in the e-sports and professional gaming industry - it’s almost as though despite women having the passion and talent for gaming, the community are reluctant to be gender inclusive.

So, we have more women gaming than ever, but the gaming community is continuing to reject female players. 

It comes to me as something similar to that of driving - plenty of women have cars and take themselves from A to B every single day, but still the runaround joke is that women are awful drivers and can hardly handle a parallel park.

It’s the same with the ‘girl gamer’ discussion - women are incapable of anything technical and therefore will be laughed out of the place at even a solitary attempt at trying.

We exist, of course we do, but should any attention be drawn to us, we become humiliated to the point of no longer wishing to be apart of something we enjoy. 

Yet again, it all comes down to our good old friend, sexism deeply rooted in society. 

Women currently make up 30% of all YouTube Gaming audiences, the highest percentage we’ve seen - but, the overwhelming majority of men is still prevalent, and ultimately, until we change the rhetoric and make the gaming community a place that no longer shuns women and advocates for their involvement, the number of female gamers will dwindle and become smaller and smaller until we are the tiny proportion that gatekeepers of gaming would like us to be.

Something else that’s worth considering is the aspect of gendered gaming - the idea that specific games must be made with the idea of marketing to women as a key focus. This has been very popular in terms of games apps on smartphones and Internet games; again, women are pushed into a corner here, effectively told the standard games are not suitable for them and they must play something different.

For me, it’s divisive, and continues to keep women out of mainstream gaming. 

As women, we might want to game differently to men, but that shouldn’t prevent us from having an active role in the gaming community.

To end on a hopeful note, there’s still a lot left for us to achieve in terms of opening up the inclusivity of gaming so that women are not only made to feel welcomed, but actively encouraged - but if the success of women breaking down barriers in other areas of life are anything to go by, cracking this nut should be no sweat.