In the past decade, Esports has seen tremendous growth in both revenue and viewership worldwide. While more and more games are organizing high stakes high prize pool tournaments and events, the majority of those competing in those are mostly men.
Although almost half of the gamers worldwide are female, the majority representation in the Esports industry is still held by Men. This a fact that can be easily proven right if you pull up the list of top earners in Esports the first woman player (by lifetime earnings)— Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn, appears only at rank 418. While the 2nd highest female player (by lifetime earnings) — Li “Liooon” Xiao Meng, comes at rank 921, a difference of more than 500 ranks.
With a meager representation of 0.2% in the list of the top 1000 highest overall earnings, the gap between both genders is shockingly large. While there are plenty of successful female influencers in the gaming space like Pokimane, Loserfruit, Sweet_Anita, Valkyrae, etc, very few women make it to the high echelons in Esports.
According to a report by Guardian, only three of the top 100 paid creators on Twitch are female, with significantly lower earning capacity for competing in Esports.
In the past decade, the number of female-only tournaments and events has definitely risen and so has the overall participation of women in Esports. But the problem still lies in numbers where only a fraction of prize pool money goes into women-only Esports and most goes to male-dominated stages.
Female pro gamers earn millions less than their male counterparts who are earning millions from a number of tournaments and events spread throughout the year. Whereas a female-only esports event sees only a fraction of those millions of dollars in prize money.
There are still many issues plaguing women’s participation in Esports which guarantees a separate post of its own.
But for concluding the above, a greater female representation is required in Esports which would only be possible if both game developers and organizers come together to encourage greater female participation with a high prize pool in female-only events and give more support to female gamers in terms of resources and expertise.
