Hey there.

Men are more risky, while women are better at bonding with others—stereotypes, but is there actually something to it? Using a video game, the researchers analyzed the behavior of all-men and all-women teams. Their findings have implications for esports teams and us, the average gamer.

[DISCLAIMER]: The article is written for my weekly newsletter, and published on my website. A new episode comes out every Sunday (directly into your inbox and on my website).

Have a great week,
Christian

Jealous

10152 Posts

July 10 2025 18:49 GMT

Oooh, this is an interesting one, particularly due to my academic background in psychology and gender studies research

It reminds me why I found that field to be fascinating in the first place.

It does beg the question, why do women's teams in team-based eSports like CounterStrike tend to underperform against men? It feels like after ~25 years and the proliferation/destigmatization/democratization of eSports in general, that any exposure biases which have been hypothesized in the past should be mostly gone by now, and women who participate should be on an equal footing. Even if it is to be expected that fewer women play these kinds of games overall, you would expect the ones who do dedicate themselves to them would be on par with their male competitors - unless there is something going on "under the hood" physiologically or neurologically that would explain this difference in outcome, perhaps? What are your thoughts?

Anyway, nice one. Thanks!

ZeroByte13

765 Posts

July 11 2025 13:27 GMT

They tested a very small sample on a game that seemingly has little to do with typical competitive video games, no?

Men take more risks that women, it's a known fact since long ago. It's rooted in biology (reproductive behavior) and social "rules" / traditions. It's also a known fact that in LoL and Dota women tend to play supports, a traditionally safe and not flashy role (but very important one, of course). Not all, of course, but a disproportionally high percentage.

Could it be that this specific game they tested just doesn't reward risks or individual plays? Maybe the objectively optimal way to play that game is to take zero risks, and every risk taken has much higher probabilty to lose you the game than to gain you any significant advantage.

I mean, put the same participants in Starcraft (3v3 or 4v4) or Dota / LoL / CS - and maybe results would be very different because those games reward risky behavior more?

This specific study seems to be very shallow and inconclusive, as there's a high chance the real conclusion here is "risky behavior is not rewarded in a game that doesn't reward risky behavior".
They should have tested several games including traditional competitive ones.

ZeroByte13

765 Posts

July 11 2025 13:40 GMT

On July 11 2025 03:49 Jealous wrote:
It does beg the question, why do women's teams in team-based eSports like CounterStrike tend to underperform against men?

One of the reasons could be the fact that all traditional competitive eSports games were built with male gamers in mind, consciously or subconsciously.
So these games reward what a typical male gamer sees as a good play, because otherwise they would be less popular among male gamers which comprised majority of gamers in 90s-00s.

The game from this study might have been built to reward a different kind of behavior and maybe it's less compatible with what male gamers want/tend to do and more compatible with what female gamers want/tend to do (on average, of course).

Let women come up with a few competitive games - and I think men would not dominate those games because those games won't be made with mostly men in mind, like most current competitive games are.

2 out of 3 developers of this game they tested are women.
Ellie Martin and James Jackson developed the game at the School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, under the leadership of Prof Judith Good.

Jealous

10152 Posts

July 11 2025 14:56 GMT

Great points

Made me think of poker as well, where risk-taking is a staple aspect of the game.

Edit: Another potential explanation I just remembered, specifically for high level eSports, is the variability hypothesis. It offers an explanation for the difference between men and women in terms of their bell curve distributions in various performance metrics. The most commonly talked about one is intelligence, wherein the male curve is hypothetically flatter, meaning that there are more men on either extreme of the spectrum while women are more concentrated toward the middle of the curve. Since competitive eSports is the best of the best, it would stand to reason that such a distribution would result in mostly men occupying the top (and bottom) of the field. Here's a sample graph to visualize what I'm describing:

IQ in general is a very suspect metric and this graph is just an example of an exaggerated difference between two bell curves. However, this pattern has been found across a variety of metrics, so perhaps it contributes to performance in eSports, too.

Slydie

1919 Posts

July 24 2025 12:55 GMT

On July 11 2025 22:40 ZeroByte13 wrote:

Show nested quote +

Tbh, that small study seems rigges to confirm a hypothesis.

There have been a lot of very different competitive games designed now, and afaik, women have not dominated a single one of them. There are obviously great female players in many games, but afaik, they all struggle vs. the best males wherever money or prestige is on the line.

If there is anything to the hypothesis, I think a female dominated competitive game should have surfaced by now.