I started following competitive gaming, or eSports, around the time Starcraft 2 released on July 27, 2010. Later that year, I started getting into gaming of fighting with Super Street Fighter 4, and started attending local meetups to improve my skills and abilities, as well as make new relationships, which I still have today. For a couple of years I played competitively in my scene, attended tournaments in my state, and watched top-tier players compete for thousands of dollars on twitch.tv. Another way I participated within the community was when I founded the Video Games Club at the University of Miami for people to meet and play competitively. The fighting game community prides itself on being incredibly diverse, but with the current political climate and abundance of women's marches, I've noticed that the proportion of players is heavily skewed in favor of men. Gaming communities other than the FGC, such as League of Legends and Dota, also have this uneven ratio, particularly at higher levels of play. This brings me to my question. Why are women so underrepresented at the highest levels of video games, where skill, not gender, is said to be the most important aspect of a player? Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay To begin answering this question I searched one of the FIU databases with the three keywords eSports, women, and video games. One of the articles I found published in the Journal of Sport and Social Issues is titled “Women's Experience in Esports: Gender Differences in Peer and Spectator Feedback During Competitive Video Game Play.” This article is very valuable because it directly analyzes and discusses the experiences women have during competitive gaming and I believe it may be why there is a lack of women in eSports. Researchers Omar Ruvalcaba, Jeffrey Shulze, Angela Kim, Sara Berenzki and Mark Otten conducted two studies. In the first study, researchers analyzed gender differences in online gamers' experiences with feedback from other players and spectators during online gameplay. The second study analyzed gender differences observed during male and female streamers' gameplay and comments directed at them on Twitch.tv. I found the results intriguing because the researchers went against my preconceived notions that the data said women didn't receive as many negative comments from men while playing online as I thought they would and in fact received more positive comments. However, women received ten times more sexual comments from commenters while streaming on Twitch. This leads me to believe that the issue may be more complex than I initially thought, and that this study may have benefited from live observations at events rather than relying solely on online gameplay. After reading the first article, I wanted to see an example that was more focused on an individual's experience than that of a group. I ran a search looking for high-profile women in esports and quickly came across a woman named Kim Se-Yeon, also known as Geguri, who plays in the Overwatch League. An article I found inside a book called Feminist Media Studies titled “I play to win!”: Geguri as a (post)feminist icon in eSports” details Geguri's rise to becoming a feminist icon in gaming but it also exemplifies how women in eSports are not given the same opportunities to fail and are“trained to uphold sexist structures and focus on their own shortcomings as individuals.” The article also states that women, like Geguri, often feel the need to reject feminism and adopt a post-feminism mindset to mitigate negative attention from male gamers. This article helped me understand exactly what type of harassment women in the world of eSports can experience and leads me to believe that this is a contributing factor to why women are underrepresented. However, because eSports is such a meritocracy and are under the umbrella of “gaming”, there must be problems within the gaming industry and not just eSports. My search to see if there is a larger problem led me to information that went against the ideas I had about games in general. I learned that women make up a large portion of the population that considers themselves gamers, however that they don't play the same types of games that men tend to play. This point was made clear in Aleks Krotoski's article “Chicks and Joysticks – an Exploration of Women and Gaming” found in the ELSPA White Paper which was reproduced in Male and Female Roles in the article “Males and Females Both Embrace Gaming Technology. Krotoski uses this article to “examine the role of women in computer games, as audiences and as contributors to the future of interactive entertainment. It will demonstrate that women are a growing force behind the scenes and at the checkout, and that their inclusion is ushering in the era of gaming as a mass-market phenomenon.” In the article Krotoski shows how, even though boys were the predominant gamers in the 1980s, companies like HerInteractive and Purple Moon Interactive arose, which saw the potential of girls in the market and began creating games intended to be purchased by girls. Krotoski details that women's choice in games differs from the mainstream shooter and sports simulation categories and instead reflects a desire to use technology to learn skills about themselves and to enjoy good storytelling, rich characterization, and choice in how pursue goals, and a number of other reasons. After reading this article, the reason why women don't play competitive games is slowly becoming clearer to me. One of the reasons I thought there was no representation is because women just don't play. This article shows me that this reasoning is false and that women are playing, but not the games that men tend to play. This isn't to say they don't play competitive games at all, as Krotoski says in his article, there is a subculture of women who play games like Quake and Counter-Strike that are predominantly "boys" games. However, the majority of female gamers seem to have started to shy away from these types of games in favor of games that involve a heavy plot or are more "casual". As I continued my research, another article caught my attention that began to reinforce the idea that more women are starting to play the game. The article in question, which I found on the Opspiring View Points database, is written by John C. Beck and Mitchell Wade and is titled “Video Games Transcend Gender Roles”. In this article Beck describes a survey he conducted and interviews with college students. The data they received was complex and stated that most men thought that women gambled much less than men or not at all. It also said that men were more likely to say they played during their teenage years while women were less likely to say they played during their teenage years, even though data showed that nearly 40% of all gamers are women . What.