E-sports, A Man's World? How Gender Ratios in E-Sports Teams Affect Perceptions

Abstract: E-sports have gone from being a niche community of video gamers to becoming mainstream, with million dollar prize pools for the best players. With the growth of e-sports, companies have increasingly become interested in sponsoring teams, sometimes going as far as to found their own teams. Despite its growth, however, e-sports remains male-dominated with almost all professional gamers being male. Previous research shows that in sports perceived as being masculine, and in other masculine domains, stereotypes often exist, altering the perception of those who break these stereotypes. This study explores how the perception of e-sports teams differs depending on their gender ratios. An experiment was administered where three groups received a respective simulated newspaper article about a new e-sports team, with different gender ratios for each group: one all-male team, one mixed female and male team and one all-female team.. Data from 122 respondents was thereafter collected and measured with regards to attitude, interest, perceived skill, likelihood to share the article, and likelihood to watch the team play. The results indicated that respondents tended to show more interest in teams including female players than in the all-male team. Interestingly, the added interest arose for both the mixed-gender team and the all-female team, suggesting that it was not the lack of males that added interest but rather the occurrence of females. Furthermore, this study suggests that e-sports teams looking to increase levels of interest should attempt to add female players, all else equal.