You are rather hard to understand but I think you’re acknowledging Blizzard wasn’t involved, which is progress.
I don’t see how you think owl is involved outside of it just being blamed for everything on this forum, which is very silly.
The words used in the post are fine by me.
The only thing I could see changing the situation is that you need a lot more visible women in gaming mixed with men, both pro and non-pro so that the perception changes.
I doubt that it would change too much though since a large portion of gamers are hormonal teenagers.
There might be a comraderie issue at play in this sense. Maybe there are female crew members, camera crew, IT crew whatever, but they wouldn’t really need to mesh with the male crew, wouldn’t need to spend time with them etc. Just show up, do your job, go home. But with the players, you expect them to spend time together, building trust and comraderie etc, which could present a problem if there’s 1 female and 5 males in consistently close proximity. Not to say males and females can’t live together without issue, but throw in the competitive nature of gaming and overall tendency to blame and get upset, and the fact that these are usually very young adults, and it might become a problem from time to time. But idk, just a thought.
Ancient gamer here to say that many of these complaints smack of “nO GurlZ ALloWeD!” signs on a treehouse.
If there’s ANY problem anyone should have with it, it’s that Blizzard doesn’t organize a TON of smaller tournaments for the playerbase, even without cash rewards. Their focus on a pro level scene that doesn’t even have a decent feeder system and a lack of grassroots among all ages, genders, and skill levels is really the biggest reason OWL seems like a fake.
F’ Pete’s sake, it’s not like Blizzard doesn’t have Starcraft 2 sitting right there to show them how tons of little tournaments and an in game tournament mode helped build what’s still a decently sized e-sport community two decades later. But don’t get mad that that same ladies who won’t get the time of day from pro organizations jumped on this tournament.
If anything, you should be asking why the likes of Aspen and Geguri can’t even crack a Contenders lineup now in favor of a bunch of nobodies who don’t noticably outperform them. That’s why events like these matter. They can’t get a foot in the regular door, give them a way to at least get a LITTLE shine.
There is another reason why women struggle to break through that no one talks about.
Mixed team can be problematic because it is not just about performance but also how well the players gel/click on a social level. 98% of the time this team is playing together it is during practice, not the competition on stage. The dynamics between male>male, male>female, female>male and female>female are all different and having too many different social dynamics in a team can impair overall team performance.
An all male team, or all female team, is much easier to manage than a mixed team, only referring to the social expectations people have of each other. For a women to perform optimal she needs to be able to be her, not be expected to act like one of the guys, to create this environment where she can be her but not be somewhat isolated from the team is very hard. This is not even talking about how men and women tend to distract each other from time to time simply because they’re men and women.
I’m just wondering how other tournaments are not safe places for these folks. Do other tournaments have policies in place preventing them from playing?
You can’t force owl teams to pick up female players.
There was a female owl player, Geguri, she was pretty good but her team picked up the best off tank in the entire world so she didn’t play. Not really sexist, they just wanted to win.
Along with that I can’t think of notable female players besides like Aspen, who always looked meh in contenders. She wasn’t bad by any means but there were clearly better main supports.
Could Blizzard make contenders more open to female players, yes and they should.
But you can’t force teams to pick up female players for diversity.
Exactly. It’s extremely disturbing that they think that engaging in the exact thing they’re “trying to fight”. It was the same with the massive fund that was just plain discriminatory towards men in the field. You can’t fight selective identity politics with more selective identity politics.
Now there’s nothing wrong with making a tournament exclusive to women for the sake of making one like that. But to indirectly make it be toxic and defame other tournaments and to engage in even more identity politics is just extremely disturbing
Tell me how many tournaments you’ve seen a woman play in? Or how many OWL matches have a woman in? This isn’t “segregating” anything. It’s giving women the space they need to safely compete without feeling scrutinised for being the only woman in the tournament.
Oh and if you actually knew what segregation was and how horrific segregation was in South Africa, you’d stop using the word in vain. It’s very immature.
It’s not identity politics to point out that women are treated like garbage in online gaming. It’s not identity politics to want to take steps and measures to prevent that.
They might not get roasted for being a woman but for other things. Women still bully each other. Thats a thing. Gaming has a trash talk culture. Its not like men just bullying women. Its everyone is trash talking each other.
You just see and hear less about women roasting each other because there are statistically less women in gaming.
In the gaming industry you need thick skin if youre a guy or a girl regardless. Having no man in the tournament doesnt make it more “safe”. You just take the competitiveness out of it because you dont compose the teams based on skill but just their gender.
I have female gamer friends and they trash talk me all the time. Males dont have immunity to this for being male. You could just assume that we deal with it better because we’re used to it.
Have you ever seen the sexist sludge people type when a woman speaks in chat?
If in were a girl I wouldn’t touch this game with a ten foot pole. A bunch of pathetic gamer boys did that.
Its one of those things , between a rock and a hard place:
If they do it, its bad. If they dont, its worse.
No matter what happens, everytime some company does something like this, they are always going to get trashed about it.
So today i feel like a female. Prove me wrong.
Wonder if there’ll be a climate change, disband the police, jump the shark etc cup 
Overwatch racing game. We have all the cups.
People keep posting it so they can have a no-context-needed laugh about “hurr durr fEmAlEs suck at games!”
This is a very overlooked but honestly true statement. I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “putting your gender/race on trial”, and there is a lot of accuracy to that.
I’ll also mention that being the only woman would certainly have its downsides as well. God forbid you underperform in a game - If one of the guys did it, it would either be dismissed as “one of those things”, and at worst he’d get mocked for being a “bad player”. But if a woman were to underperform in the OWL, you know people would start saying things like “This proves women are bad at video games”, “She proved why there aren’t more women in the OWL”, etc. That happens so often with women full stop, but I digress.
Perhaps the simple truth is less women are interested in playing FPS games overall.
There is nothing stopping a woman getting to position 1, t500 on their chosen hero as they can do so from the comfort of their home if they have the skills to do so.
You say inequality but if there were more women than men in t500 then there would be more women than men moving up to the pro scene and considering there’s nothing stopping a woman getting to t500 I’m struggling to see where the inequality is…
For example, more females choose to go in to teaching younger school-aged children (6-12), it’s not that males aren’t capable of doing it, just that they’re not as interested in it (as evidenced by less males studying it at college/university). No one is crying misandry (prejudice against men) over that as they are just as welcome to study the course… 
Source? If you’re going to make a claim like that I want you to provide the reaction time in m/s for both sexes.
What’s the reaction time difference? 5ms? 50ms? 500ms (half a second)? You can’t say I’m wrong without proving how you’re right…
To my knowledge there are no ‘men only’ tournaments but there are ‘women only’ tournaments.
Basically it’s the same thing as I said about OW, to my knowledge there is no advantage to being male or female when it comes to chess… 
So there is no evidence? Thanks
Do OW tournaments actively ban women? Do they have a “no women allowed” rule?
There is more men in esports because esports gravitates more around men, but women can play it too, there is nothing wrong with it; Just like ballet, for example, gravitates more around women, but there are men practicing it, it just more rare, and again, there is nothing wrong with it…
The tournament had very positive reception from the women who actually played in it. Stay mad 