E-sport "inclusiveness": you can do better :-/

Check your comprehension skills before talking about baseless claims. The very first thing I mentioned was about feminism and what an abomination it has been seen as, I.E. misandry. You totally glossed over that I think both men and women disliking each other is pathetic on both ends. Re-read the entire post you cherry picked your quote from.

oh I forgot to add :wink:

Sorry, I should have remembered not many people have the access to articles that I do (I’m a researcher in academia) so I should have checked if it was an open access source. I’m summarize for those that don’t have access.

Disclaimer: I’m a biochemist/bioinformatician, so my interpretation could be a little off, but I at least know enough about statistics to get the broad strokes.

Overall, the biggest difference from what I can see in the data, is the distribution of errors in tracking. The best performing men always beat the best performing women by rather large margins (~30-100% better than the best woman depending on the test). It was most noticeable when they quantified the error in terms of milliseconds of lag; the top performing male quartile (so the top 25%) had lower lag than the best performing female with the three best males having half the lag of best individual female (~20 ms vs ~45 ms).

The researchers looked to see if there was a difference in the way the males and females were moving their hands through kinematic measures. They found that men and women were moving their hands in highly similar ways and could not find a statistical difference. They also tracked the user’s gaze during the trials (each participant did 10 trials for each test). Looking at the distributions, the shape and values are nearly identical between men and women.

Since the gaze tracking and hand movements of the men and women were nearly identical while the men are substantially better at tracking (30%+ better from what I can gather from the graphs), the researchers concluded that the difference in performance is due to men having a faster processing pathway for decision making based on visual stimuli and converting them into hand movements.

The results of the study make sense overall if you remember the division of labor that occurred while humans were developing. Men were hunters while women were gathers. Evolutionary pressure selected for men that were better at hunting (reacting to prey movements or similar traits) which leads to better hand-eye coordination processing in modern gamers. Meanwhile, women experienced pressures to make them better at gathering (typical example is women have more cones in their eye which allow them to distinguish shades of colors better than men; thought to allow them to better discern between poisonous and edible berries in ancient times)

Hope that summary of the study is helpful.

Now what does that mean at the pro gamer level? Pro gamers are certainly residing at the extreme tail of the distribution of performance regardless of sex. So the fact that the best performing men handily defeat the best female is kind of a big deal at the pro level. And its not just that the best man is just edging out the best woman, it is that that best 10% of men are at least as good as the best individual woman, with the top 5% of men being substantially better at tracking. When it comes to putting together a pro team, that type of difference is going to result in nearly all of the pro players being men if the recruitment is primarily based on mechanical abilities.

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They would instantly offend the trans community and we can’t have that.

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Thanks for the info, also remember you’re posting to a non-scientific board so perhaps a tl;dr with the raw stats and basic definition would help:

  • men 30% faster tracking

I couldn’t quite tell but is the kinematic thing reaction speed? If not, was there a difference with reaction speed between the two sexes? :thinking:

I was going to say something like this, but the mindworm had me thinking “Does thinking this make me a bigot?”.

I need to get off the internet for a while…

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That summary was trying to explain what the study looked at and how they came to their conclusions. Papers from the Nature family of journals are very information dense and require a ton of baseline knowledge to figure them out. A lot of grad students have trouble with interpreting papers in Nature right up until they are about to defend their PhD dissertation. I went for a longer form to be more thorough for those that are interested.

From what I can gather, the kinematics is them measuring the velocity and acceleration of the hand during the course of the tracking along both the x- and y-axes. The short version is that the hand movements and the rate of change of the movements were indistinguishable between men and women.

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Fair enough, thanks for the clarification.

So basically the study says men track at a rate of roughly 30% better than women?

So what do you make of that finding in relation to my comment?

Is it a blanket advantage across all heroes or heroes that require more tracking (Soldier, Zarya, etc).

Is that advantage enough to show why most pro players are men? :thinking:

I added this at the end of the study summary as an edit so you may have missed it.

As for a blanket statement about men vs women with tracking, 30% for the average man vs average woman is in the right ballpark based on the study in question. However, to reiterate, professionals are not found at the averages of skill distributions; they are at the extreme tails. The difference between peak values for men in women in the study cited start at 30% in favor of men, and some of them are 100% better in favor of men for tracking depending on how you quantify the differences.

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I did sorry. :upside_down_face:

So just to confirm, is this study (and your thoughts) saying that there is a rather large difference between the two sexes at the elite level?

If so, is there grounds for perhaps separating the sexes at the pro level? :thinking:

Based on this study, it appears that at the elite level men do have a substantial advantage in tracking. However, that isn’t to say that women couldn’t be better at other traits that pro eSport participants would need. The study just indicates that there is at least some evidence of a sex difference that could explain why women are rare in pro eSports. Other data is needed to assess more than that.

Personally, I will stop short at saying there should be separate pro leagues for men and women. First, I don’t have enough data. Its not my field of study so I’m not going allow one study to completely set my stance.

Second, when we separate men and women in athletics the traits in question tend to be of the sort where there is very little overlap between men and women. The distributions for those traits like speed, acceleration, jumping height, various strength metrics, etc have low overlap between the sexes even in the general population, and virtually none at the pro levels. For instance, the US women’s soccer team practices against under 18 men’s teams and have a fairly even record against them; that is how big the disparity is in that sport. In track, many of the women’s world records wouldn’t even make the podium at an average high school boys track meet. You can also look into serve speed in tennis for other data points. The difference in traits that dictate performance in those fields is high enough that tactics have very little chance of making up the difference. There isn’t a lot of strategy that can make up someone being 0.5 sec faster in a short sprint or can lift 220 lbs (100 kg) more than you.

When I look at the tracking distributions from that study, there is still a lot of overlap between men and women. Even the difference at the top while looking big in percent isn’t so large when you look at the absolute values that good tactics couldn’t cover some of the disparity; very much the opposite of most traditional sports. Add in that women could do better in other traits that are valuable in eSports (again not my field, so I am not going to say if that evidence does/doesn’t exist), and the overall difference might not be that big.

This brings into question numerous other societal aspects that influence the number of men and women in the talent pool for eSports. If you want to know more about those, you would need to ask my wife. Her PhD is in sociology and is vastly better suited to answer those type of questions than I am.

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This is the crux of the argument which I said in my initial comment you replied to:

You’ve produced evidence on ‘tracking’ in favor of males which is one facet of playing Overwatch but is it a major facet or a minor one? To what degree does superior tracking contribute to the overall ability of an Overwatch player?

To be fair you said you don’t have enough data on the matter.

The flipside you bring up, societal aspects, are women actually interested in FPS games? Is anything preventing them from ‘playing’ the game?

I said earlier (but not to you):

…and there isn’t. Any women can pickup Overwatch and ‘play.’ Do we have a 50/50 split of men to women at lower ranks? 40/60, 20/80? What’s the distribution?

This is the thing, how many female friends are saying to their female friends “let’s play Overwatch this weekend in a group?” Or is it just the lone gamer-girls that group up with male friends?

Inclusion can’t be forced if the minority isn’t interested to begin with… :thinking:

It actually can. If minority isn’t interested, then it obviously means, that someone ain’t inclusive enough.

In case of e-sports, it means, that environment isn’t as welcoming, as it should be, and makes even those, who are interested, to change their mind quickly.

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In 2010 99% of garbage collectors were men. :wink:

Is that because working in sanitation (collecting garbage) wasn’t inclusive enough for the ladies or was the simple truth women didn’t want to collect garbage :wink:

Source: https ://www.mswmanagement.com/collection/article/13024952/women-in-waste

Thoughts on making collecting garbage ‘more welcoming to women’? :thinking:

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Reduce required weight you need to lift.

It worked in army, right? Having different fitness standards.

If men and women are equal, then their preferences should also be somewhat similar. And if it’s not the case, then either someone is not inclusive, or whole idea of equality starts falling apart.

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Cute.

Requirements to work a garbage truck job:

  • ability to drive a truck
  • ability to use the ‘fork’ to life garbage can from sidewalk and empty in to truck
  • ability to tip tray when truck full at garbage depot

You’re suggesting women…cannot drive or push buttons? :thinking:

Try again… :wink:

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Often it has to be done by hand, too. Plus it’s generally unpleasant work, with bad smells and chances to get some of that garbage on yourself.

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Source? Which western countries/states do it by hand?

laughs OH NOES! Better let males do it then! :wink: :rofl: :upside_down_face:

Why reduce the required weight? If a woman wants the job, she shouldn’t be given special treatment to enter that said job. Same for ethnic backgrounds too. The most qualified should be getting said job. I get there will be exceptions to every rule, but that would be it. An exception for a very specific reason.

If they lower the weight needed to lift for women, what happens when she can’t lift something? Is it a male counterpart’s job to do that for her? Are they getting the same wages for work done or postion/job title?

This is a slippery slope that doesn’t produce true equality like a lot of people like to assume.

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It never was about true equality, it was about illusion of one.

Think US army already ran into that problem, but so far, nothing is done about it. Since you can’t just reject female medic, because she can’t lift man in full gear to carry him to safety.

Here is question for you - how can you deny job on such basis, without looking sexist?

Glad to see that’s being acknowledged. I’m all for exceptions when appropriate. The task can be vastly different from profession to profession, and there’s no easy one size fits all answer. The closest answer you get is cutting the BS/lies.

Men and Women aren’t equal. We’re equally valuable in different ways. That should be celebrated, and we should not disrespect someone because they are different, as basic human decency is concerned.

This is something that is being honestly discussed less and less as time goes on.

As for your question at the end, that would require work from a social point where people get tuned into reality, through being honest primarily leading with facts. Not emotions. Looking sexist when sexism isn’t the true issue. It’s all about perception rooted in social/political coils. Placating.