Why are there so few female professionals gamers?

Starcraft 2 (SC2) and League of Legends (LoL) are two of the most highly competitive eSports today. Each of these games has a corresponding professional circuit. Players at the highest level compete in international tournaments that draw massive numbers of fans, who can either watch the games live on the internet or attend in person. These tournaments can be LANs, in which a number of different games are played (e.g. Dreamhack, Intel Extreme Masters, etc) or much larger international leagues (e.g. LoL’s League Championship Series and subsequent World Championship). Players typically live together in a teamhouse, in which they train for upwards of 12 hours a day.

Some background information about how these games are played would, perhaps, be useful. Starcraft II is a real-time-strategy game (RTS) that requires players to accumulate resources that are spent on expanding economy, creating armies, and advancing technology. There are three major ‘races’ as they are known: Terran, the archetypal space-faring humans (complete with tanks and marines), Zerg, a swarm of mutated insects, and Protoss, a technologically advanced civilization that has fallen from grace. Two players face off against each other, choosing one of these three races (they aren’t mutually exclusive, by the way; ‘mirror matchups’ like Protoss versus Protoss are quite common). Each race has different strengths and weaknesses, and opponents use a combination of strategy, mechanical control of their units, multitasking, and subterfuge to achieve victory (which comes from either surrender, or from the obliteration of all the opponent’s structures).

League of Legends is a massive online battle arena game (MOBA). Two teams consisting of five members each square off to destroy the opposing team's base. Each player selects and controls one of over one hundred individual ‘champions,' each of which have unique abilities. As in SC2, players acquire resources, but in LoL funds are spent on items that grant champions additional bonuses. That LoL is played by teams means that unlike SC2, LoL requires specialization on the part the individual members and fluid coordination of the group as a whole. 

There are very, very few successful professional female gamers. SC2 boasts only one, and League of Legends features exactly zero.

I’d like to suggest two points as to why this is, each of which have been discussed in other articles (namely by Kaitlin Silver of GameSkinny and Tuck359 and GentlemanGustaf of Reign of Gaming). The first, and perhaps most important, is the misogyny seemingly ingrained into the online communities behind LoL and SC2 (and virtually every other video game). The second is that there are simply fewer female players, and that the channels through which men become professional players are much less accessible for women. These points work in tandem to create a vicious circle that is difficult to break.

Perhaps examples of misogyny in this sphere aren’t necessary, but here are some anyway. This is exactly the sort of thing that keeps most female players quiet about their gender.

A prime example of these attitudes in action can be seen in the sudden appearance and subsequent meteoric fall of Team Siren. Claiming to be the first all-female LoL team, Team Siren elected to burst onto the scene with this video, which was almost instantly met with ridicule – from both well known and virtually anonymous community members, and even from professional players in a professional context. Responses to Team Siren were, sadly, unsurprising. The players were accused of using their sex for streaming revenue. Their appearances were assessed. And they were unanimously labeled, put simply, bad.

This last criticism is highly relevant, and irrefutably correct. Although they were marketed as a professional team, they played at nowhere near that level. This can most clearly be seen in a game they lost to "HotshotGG & Friends." A group of highly ranked players formed a spurr-of-the-moment team and played Team Siren half-seriously. Team Siren lost the game handily. The question of Team Siren's skill is an important one. While it is likely that the community would have reacted negatively (to say the least) to any kind of video like Team Siren's introduction, it is just as likely their poor marketing would have been forgiven if they had the skill to back it up. Had they become a force to be reckoned with, they would have been accepted into the community - much like Scarlett in SC2.

Unfortunately Team Siren never had the time to see if they could grow into the kind of team that would be able to compete at the highest level of play. About four months after their introduction, Team Siren disbanded, to which the community responded to with what felt like universal glee and almost no surprise whatsoever. Although Team Siren never made a formal statement as to the reasons for their disbanding, it was made clear by the players (Yoonie via youtube and Tick via forums) that it had something to do with a combination of "haters," poor internal communication, and financial issues. 

These are problems that can plague any team. But it becomes that much harder when that team's distinctive feature is that it is comprised exclusively of women. As Katlin Silver points out, "by creating an all-female team, the priority of getting women to be seen as equals in a male-dominated world was contradicted from the very start and further distanced their sense of equality." Rather than sending a message of gender integration and respect, Team Siren's message was, well, the opposite. 

That there are fewer female players in League of Legends is an important point. GentlemanGustaf uses a chess analogy to explain, and concludes that the difference in skill levels between female and male LoL players "comes almost entirely from the much smaller pool of female players, not an inherent skill gap." This is complicated when one considers how it is that people actually become skilled at a game. To improve at any sport, a player must play against, and eventually beat, those who are at a comparable skill level. The North American LoL scene is notorious for suffering due to its relatively small pool of top level teams. Unlike as in Europe, where almost any team could have made it to the World Championship, the NALCS was comparatively stagnant, and the gap between the top and bottom teams was enormous. For female players, breaking into the highest tiers of play requires them to play against players of that caliber.

Efforts to introduce female players into the professional SC2 scene have failed. Examples of this include Eve and Aprodite in Korea, who were picked up by established and highly respected teams (Slayers and StarTale respectively). They faced many of the same criticisms that Team Siren faced when they were introduced, but unlike Team Siren, Eve and Aphrodite attempted to break into the highest level of play - the GSL in Korea. Despite this, neither did well. Eve's career sputtered early, and Aphrodite failed to qualify for Code A in 2012. This is not evidence that women aren't skilled - rather, it is further evidence of the 'fewer player effect.' If more women had these opportunities, the likelihood of one of them succeeding in the GSL is much higher.

All-female leagues and tournaments have had mixed results. The only serious attention Girls4LoL ever got was for controversy over whether the players were, in fact, women. On the other hand, the SC2 Iron Lady invitational tournament series helped launch the careers of Eve, Aphrodite, and Scarlett. But as Tuck359 argues, creating and depending on all-female leagues runs the risk of pigeonholing women into leagues that are followed, but remain at a much lower level of play. Women can, and should, be able to play at the highest levels of eSports.

And one does. Scarlett is hailed as the most successful female SC2 player. She has taken games off of extremely talented and well known players (including the legendary Jaedong), and recently defeated Bomber in a series that included, according to Day9 (renowned commentator and former professional player), "the greatest SC2 game that has ever been played...ever."

So what makes Scarlett different? Why has she succeeded where so many have not? She practices like mad. She has trained in Korea. She analyzes her opponents and counters their playstyles. She plays mindgames. She has fantastic mechanics. She has an incredible understanding of the game. In short, she's good - and she happens to be female.

But Scarlett may well have failed in LoL where she succeeded in SC2. SC2 is played by individuals, and the matchmaking system that the professional players use is available to everyone. By playing well enough, Scarlett earned the opportunity to play against the highest ranked players in the world. LoL, on the other hand, is more complicated. The individual matchmaking system available to all players does allow you to join the highest individual level of players, but it doesn't grant you access to teams. The skillset required to rise the matchmaking ladder in LoL and the skillset required to play with and against high level teams are completely different. Therefore there is an entire second set of skills that is required to become a professional that cannot be acquired through the matchmaking system. It is this difference in skillsets that creates another obstacle for female players in LoL. Yet another obstacle is that these teams are comprised entirely of men, which brings us back to misogyny.

Frankly, the situation is dire. However, there are a number of suggestions as to how women can expand their presence in professional eSports scenes. For one, misogyny in the communities must be actively combated - although it is surely an uphill battle. This requires both men and women to both refuse to participate in misogynistic discourse and to stand up to those that do. Secondly, at least as far as LoL goes, women need to play alongside men, not against them. As difficult as it may be, women need to be integrated into teams that already exist. And finally, those things need to happen now. eSports are fairly young, but they started out almost completely dominated by men, and it will require time for women to establish themselves. The sooner the toxicity of the communities is reduced, the quicker women can get into the scenes, and we'll all be better off for it.