Females don't play videogames. Obviously, games are only created for male players… or maybe not, but that's what a lot of young (and not so young) males seem to think. The gaming industry has thus far been a male dominated industry. For a long while videogames have been deemed as something "for males"; and even within the programming industry itself only few women would apply for a job in a video game company. But only recently has the world suddenly realized that yes, maybe the female population is actually interested in games.

Female gaming is becoming more and more popular, the industry has recently shown a lot of interest in the female audience, pink Playstation 2, PSP and DS have been popping up in stores, and the democratization of girls in video games is on its way. Although the efforts from Sony, Nintendo and many others is mainly marketing driven, the interest of such companies shows that that there is a strong market for girls to actually play video games. According to a study by the Entertainment Software Association in 2005, women comprised of 43% of all gamers. Ignoring such number, many people in the esports scene fail to accept and acknowledge females as gamers.

According to Wikipedia, a girl gamer is a female who works in the game development industry, or regularly engages in the practice of gaming. This range from casual gaming to professional gaming, where female players often draw extra attention due to their rarity. I will not write much about the females who work in the game development industry but it is still necessary to talk about them a bit in order to see some of the reasons behind the lack of females in the esport scene. As surprising as it may be, females have always been in the video game industry; although in a lesser proportion than males.

The Blue Sky Rangers, Intellivision's game development team during the 1980-83 Console wars, included several of the first female game programmers in the video game industry. Julie Hoshizaki, Ji-Wen Tsao, Roberta Williams and a few others worked on hugely popular Intellivision games such as Shark! Shark! or King's Quest. Females have always been present in the video games industry, but since then, the proportion of female programmers in the industry has not increased that much, but the trend is slowly changing.

According to Game developer Magazine’s April 2006 Fifth Annual Salary Survey, the percentage of women in the games industry is 10%, which corresponds to a 7% increase compared to 2004's figure.  In an editorial written for womengamers.com, Michelle Clay of Turbine Games gives her opinion about this situation. "Men, already having hobbies of tinkering with radios and cars and erector sets, took up computer-building for amusement first.  It’s no surprise that since the men got to the computers first; they also got to the games first, both in the making and the playing". Continuing, she writes "since neither young women nor young men are generally inclined to take up hobbies that they see as being the territory of the opposite sex, to this day the hobby of game-playing and the industry of game-making are only slowly being infiltrated by us girls".

The hobby of playing games is the one that interest us the most. According to BBC's 2005 "Gamers in the UK" research, the gender split is almost even, averaging out at 45% female and 55% male. This research is of course taking in account casual gaming and did not concentrate on the esport scene. But since 45% of casual gamers are females, why is there such a huge difference in the online gaming scene?

A female interview will invariably have a sentence along the lines of "Most of the insults I hear revolve around the idea that girls can't be normal people if they enjoy videogames. But we are". One of the main problems with the online community is actually that thanks to a feeling of security, a lot of gamers will show the utmost disrespect to anyone that is different. A girl gamer beats a guy? Can't possibly exist, or she is fat, ugly, or maybe not even a girl. This kind of attitude is unfortunately seen only too often on servers. Most experienced girls manage to deal with this kind of disrespect, after a while, they'll be ignoring those situations, but when it is your first ever online game session, this kind of situation can be quite frustrating. A lot of players will say that this happens just because girls are looking for attention, and that it is why they mention they are female. While this might be true for some of the girls, most of the girls would rather just be ignored. The view on this issue from Livia "Liefje" Teernstra from the girlz 0f destruction team is crystal clear, "indifference from guys in the community would be something that female gamers would really appreciate" she said, before adding "just to be treated like a normal player would be great for the girls".


"I have never seen a female finishing first of an event; it must mean they are just not good enough." This quote has been taken from the comments of news on a popular gaming website. The author of this sentence has forgotten a word, which is "yet". The female population in online gaming has only recently increased. When the proportion of gamers is strongly dominated by males, the chance of seeing girls rising up in the rankings are diminishing a lot. But recently, more and more females have started to appear in the scene, and some of them could well be a threat to male gamers. Girl gamers are in majority relatively new to the professional scene, and be it a team or a single gamer, they will not have as much preparation and training as a male team such as team fnatic. Female gaming is still something new and that is evolving, and just like a few years ago for males, we need to give them time to train and get used to professional gaming. With the right motivation, support and given enough time, they will reach the top. There is no reason why a female team can't beat a male team.

Korea, the land of gaming, has some talented female gamers who can also beat some of the best. One of the most successful female gamers is to be found in the team STX Soul, under the name of Seo Ji "Tossgirl" Soo. During 2006's WCG Seo Ji Soo beat one of the StarCraft stars of the moment, Hong Jin Ho also known as KTF YellOw. Tossgirl has also been one of the reigning champions of the female Starcraft scene and its female-only tournaments.


Female-only tournaments are actually part of this situation. They are helping the scene for now, thanks to the additional exposure they give to girls. "Hopefully this will encourage other girls not to be intimidated to enter into the main tournaments. It's also good in the eyes of media coverage because it kind of breaks down the barrier that the only people that play computer games are nerdy, unsocial guys" says Liefje. But we must hope that this won't be needed anymore in the long term. "There is not a need to separate females and males in LAN tournaments. The FPA has had many discussions about this and as a collective we believe that this is working against our goals at this time" says Leanne "Lilie" Pyle, Female Player Alliance's creator and spokesperson, which was confirmed by Liefje when she said "I hope that there won't be any more need for all-female tournaments because it will be an equal amount of girls and guys competing"

The separation of males and females in tournaments has always been a sensitive point. While real sports such as boxing, athletics, basketball and many others might require such a separation, no one is really sure whether or not this is necessary for gamers. The reason behind this is that unlike those sports, esports does not rely on strength, size, muscles or other physical properties. Instead, it relies on abilities such as hand-eye coordination, reflexes and thinking. Although scientific studies have proven that men outperform females when it comes to spatial abilities and navigating, this is only a slight disadvantage for females. The navigational difference would only prove to be a disadvantage while learning the maps, which would prove harder to females than to males. The only real problem relies on the spatial ability difference, which might prove to be a disadvantage to a female as they might have a harder time understanding the position of opponents. But females can outperform males when it comes to aiming, thinking and reflexes, so this slight disadvantage might not be such a problem after all.

Another separation between males and females in the community are the female-only clans. This is a controversial subject, females and males are both very distinctive and as you probably all remember from school (and from the dawn of humanity), the groups that form there are usually based on gender. So it is not exactly surprising to find the same kind of behaviour in gaming. On this subject, Lilie says that "the differences are very little and I think it is because I am comfortable in either situation. Some girls are only comfortable around other girls, and I think some guys are only comfortable around guys. As for how that affects our goals for the FPA, I don't think it will as long as people are willing to work together."  But it is also believed that this creates a barrier between female and male as they are both staying apart instead of joining in one community.


To tackle those problems, associations are created by groups of people who want to see the situation evolve. For female developers we have seen the creation of the Special Interest Group for women in game development through the International Game Developers Association (IGDA). When it comes to esports, we have the recently created Female Players Alliance, created by mother and daughter Leanne “Lilie” Pyle and Christalynne “Starbuck” Pyle. Lillie is also one of the founders of the community website QuakeCommunity.com and Lead Producer of the Quake4 Mod DeltaCTF. She is also the wife of Donnie "SyncError" Domino, who is working for id Software as Community Liaison and is well known amongst Quake 4 gamers. Lilie also is the mother of Christalynne and Andrew "Ninja-K" Pyle. Coming from a gaming family, Christalynne “Starbuck” Pyle has naturally picked up gaming at her youngest age, her actual game is Quake4.


Together with her mother, they have created the Female Player Alliance to get more female gamers active in the community and in order to establish equality between females and males in the online gaming field. "We decided to start the FPA to make a change in the community for the better. We have to start somewhere and together we have found a lot of other girls that needed help getting active" Said Starbuck.

The FPA has many programs that are aiming towards improving the outlook of female gamers; Starbuck told us that they "are also talking to the community to see different opinions about the current issues, so we can fix them together. Within our organization we have many programs to help with and participate in that will improve the overall outlook of female gamers". In order to do that, the FPA has many short terms plans, "We are holding Open Game Nights to promote more community online participation. We are working with QuakeCommunity.com, on Qcomm Radio to have an FPA issue at every round table broadcast. We also plan to be at Quakecon in full force, offering a booth and tons of events, including a mixed doubles tournament and a slumber party. We are also working on getting female models added to some of the most recent games both released and not released. Finally, we are implementing a practice program for women whom play Q4 to practice together and have lessons each week", said Lilie.

The FPA has received much support since its creation, but will always be seeking more, "what we have so far is an overwhelming response from developers and event managers that are happy to have somewhere to turn when issues arise concerning females in gaming. I have learned they don’t mind when we give our opinion and it wasn’t asked for either. We also have a small but strong willed staff doing all we can to make things happen right now. Small sponsorships for individual events have been easy to come by and we are very thankful to Steel Series and Escaped Turkey for their support".

Initiatives such as the FPA are very much needed and welcomed within the esport scene, but they will need all the support they can get in order to improve the situation. Having a higher presence of females amongst the community can only be positive. Seeing that the gaming scene is not only populated by males, but that it welcomes both genders, would broaden the spectrum of people and companies involved within the scene.