I dont think its enough to mean anything
I mean the numbers are like a 15% difference between men and women so 
I think a large part of it is that alot of women are really scared of becoming pro players, I mean just look at what happened to that female zarya player, she was practically witch hunted…
The lack of women and older people in esports is mostly about exposure. I suspect much like Title IX reshaped girls sports in 20 years every esport will be mix of men and women. Also odds are some of the esports that are not twitch FPS based will see older gamers in their 30s+ competing, at least at a lower levels.
the reason it’s not happening now is mostly about the lack of time and money for anyone say early 20s to try to fallow the gamer life of 15+ hours a day playing. Then female wise, women tend to be more social and 14 year old girls don’t tend to sit around playing doom in their free time with friends. So they don’t become 18 year old pros 4 years later.
I really doubt there is a performance side to any of it. Other wise we would see a huge flood of female gamers trying to make, but not being able to and that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The age thing is mostly due to OW being so new I think. Rapha (the guy dominating quake for the last 10 years) is 30 and has no signs of slowing down really, but he’s also been playing since he was a kid.
Similarly fighting games have tons of 30-40+ players who can compete at the top level but they’ve all been playing since they were kids.
It’d just really hard to break into something like esports if you’re 25-30+ and don’t have the time to play 8 hours a day.
Definitely something that plays a factor. Back in my very early BF 1942 days I had a female friend who was beyond amazing. She tried to get on pro teams but she often told me about how it felt she had to vastly outperform beyond normal expectations just to be taken seriously and even them she was seen as har har a girl. I’m just trying to offer another issue we may not be considering just in case
Even though there is some scientific literature implying men have slightly better reflexes/reaction time, there are also a couple of studies implying women have a small advantage when it comes to processing speed (like this one https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222702039_Sex_differences_in_processing_speed_Developmental_effects_in_males_and_females).
Processing speed is basically analysing the data in front of you and interpreting it (or doing a mental task). This would put women in advantage when it comes to gamesense and decisicion-making.
But I don’t think any of these studies explain why games are much more popular among men, or even why OWL is almost 100% male. I agree with the user who said there are so many factors in play here: it is difficult to reduce the entire answer to a couple of scientific articles.
(And I don’t think these articles are extremely solid evidence as far as science go, neither the one about reaction time or the one about processing speed. But I didn’t read a lot on this subject)
Pro BF42 was a joke anyway.
Yeah I think I’ve read some stuff before that women tend to have a higher verbal IQ than men which would play into processing more detailed information. I’m sure it could play out in OW with game sense.
Sorry if this came off as really unscientific as I’m sure it did. I’m a layman and new to this stuff lol
Id say a lot, women evolved to be nurturing at home making food and taking care of kids (which is why they tend to play support) so they never needed to develop high reaction speed like men who developed it through hunting and gathering. Its also the opposite in other animals like spiders and lions whos women are more the hunters.
To answer your question, I have no idea. But this is a pretty interesting thread, thanks.
Maybe? But that sounds like some evolutionary biology type of stuff which is well beyond my grasp lol. I’ll stick with what I have a chance to somewhat understand
I mean we did have a few thousand years where men’s primary value was hunting and killing in the majority of cultures. I’m not surprised that resulted in having only slightly better spacial recognition and reaction time on average.
This sort of thing is only really noticeable at the highest percentiles (less than 1%) anyway.
Hey…don’t sh*t on my childhood. You going to tell me animal crossing was a joke too…
All the factors that have performance related links to E-sports of various kinds, which all favour men at the top.
IQ
Reaction times (Visual stimuli and, audio i think)
General time spent and representation (Men both play more regurlarily all the e-sports games (FPS genre as a whole has a 7% female representation), ( Men both play more and go for train more, than females across the board)
Men are more willing to go all out in life, while women favor more balanced lives, that in the end can let them enjoy a wider variety of activities and things like “Children” to enter, their lives.
Men are for more aggressive and risk taking in nature, which both helps their development and is needed in many forms of play, at the top.
Otherwise, nothing really should stop them. I do think it is fair, that they make seperate male and female competitions. The only problem i have is, that they consntantly wan´t to make these competitions, yet not acknowledge, why females do it worse and blame it on men and the culture, when stats also show, that females aren´t at all more likely to experience abuse in gaming, than any person would (being that most games have a insanely high male player count and many of them are known as “Xtremely toxic”, it is funny that it some how still affects Women more, when they are seen this way already.). Even the Whole Ellie situation was blown into ghosts, when it then was clearly shown, that Ellied was the most toxic out of any person there, purposefully, yet also lacked any evidence the showcase the supposed harassment, that Punisher (Ellie) streamed most of.
I mean the game is fine, but the pro scene was a dead end and not taken very seriously. Also like 90% of the people who were trying to play “pro” were hacking, you could just find wallhacks and nobody could prove you had them.
I do think the gatekeeping/toxicity angle is a bit overblown. Everyone has to deal with it. Sayaplayer got death threats in a DM on twitter a few days ago and he’s in the most represented group of players in OWL (korean men.)
I have links to a thread about Ellie specifically, that mentions many aspects of abuse online, 3 things were most prevalent.
Women take harassment and problems harder and more personal, than men
Women was only a little more likely to get sexual harassment aimed at them, yet fewer of all other forms (online).
Women had the advantage of not only experience a little less harassment, they were the most likely to experience positivies as well, because of sexual attraciton and gaming being still (E-sport especially) heavily male dominated (Boosting E-girls is a meme, but is 100% a real occurrence)
I was around for the whole Ellie fiasco, the thing that really bothers me is all the people immediately jumping to Punisher’s defense didn’t apologize for trying to shut down anyone who were even slightly suspicious of Ellie (even privately where “Ellie” would never see it) even though the situation was sketchy from day 1. There were definitely an overwhelming amount of people defending “Ellie” than people doing any harassment.
Not that women don’t ever experience targeted harassment, but the idea that women suffer more from gamer harassment than anyone else on average I think is a false narrative.
If someone wants to harass you they’ll use any sort of personal information they can to try and get under your skin. Especially if it’s something that puts you in a minority. I don’t think it has anything to do with them having issues with that specific group, I think it’s just mean people looking for anything to make you feel bad about.
It the same issue we have in society, when you actually call out people for being sketchy about abuse or rape. We have cases of people being found guilty of falsely accusement of rape, yet there is still people that think it was the legal systems fault and the rapists were just found free (Not knowing, what “Found guilty in false accusation” means).
it is a huge issue with the completely subjective SJW mentality and power we live in today, it is totally devoid of logical facts or stats and yet for some reason is still actually even considered by people with to little brain to discredit none substantiated opinions and accusations.