They largely don’t now. Sometimes stuff happens on the internet, r/kappa was notorious for it. Esports orgs do hand out bans on occasions.
The Calibur community banned one person for being an asshat and froze out an orgnaizer due to it.
I will say that I made sure to work on my anti-Ivy so it didn’t happen again, made sure she got 2nd a lot. ^_^
My good friends daughter is a big gamer, and goes to UNT. Through her I know UNT is big into esports, so I looked up what is going on.
“Women in video games, especially in competitive esports, face toxicity, gender discrimination and harassment that their male counterparts don’t experience,” Wray said.
Like you, I have no direct experience as a white male, other than the general observation that the public lobbys/voice comms on many competitive games are wretched hives of scum and villainy that I avoid.
And if you want to stream, a common supplement for a lot of pro players, you are of course opened up to whole new universes of the absolute dregs of humanity. Social media, as well. And it’s easy enough to say “Ignore it,” but until you’ve lived with the most horrific, vile, unspeakable vitriol being directed at you 24/7 for as long as you can remember due to intrinsic traits, it’s hard to really grasp the sheer crushing weight it presses your spirit down with.
Outright discrimination mid-competition at any major event probably nets the offender a warning at the least, but there’s lots of subtle ways to be a shitbag (and call out your victims as “hysterical” if they dare to raise a concern about it) in those venues, on top of the more-or-less free-for-all in non-official spaces like Twitch, Twitter, etc.
So, with all that, it’s just kind. . . a lot to subject yourself to willingly for the tiny shot of actually making it as a pro gamer. Some absolutely do regardless, but whatever we as a society can do to help bolster them and ease the journey is only going to make the entire space better in the longterm. If some companies decide to hoover up some PR brownie points along the way, I’m pretty tolerant of that so long as what they’re doing is actually also genuinely helpful to the competitors.
This is also the case in France. Boardgaming knows no distinction of age or gender. Boardgaming is amazing!
Errm, anyway. In Japan (the only case I can talk about, as it’s the only place I know a bit besides France where tourney are mixed but women are vastly underrepresented, as was discussed much in this thread as a wide condition), there is a big spit between informal playing and tournaments. Tournaments are quite serious things, even in smaller scale ones (for instance, an enterprise’s own Go tournament, to speak of something I’ve seen), where the split can occur between males and females.
In informal plays in Japan, and especially in videogames, women are fierce and ultra strong opponents. As are Japanese men. There is a level of dedication that is expected of the average player that goes far beyond what we are used to in Western countries. Gaming is a very serious affair over there!
And to be fair, it seems the scale of discrimination are inverted between France and Japan in such informal conditions: when my wife played with my friends here at some games, be it SNK’s fighting game Garou, or the classical Puyo Puyo puzzle game of old, she would leisurely wipe the floor with all of us, to much of the surprise of some — to the surprise of most, to be fair. One acquaintance that was insisting on making fun of her before she could play was actually very much… “butthurt”, as they say.
That toxicity can happen even on very private levels, sadly.
Imagine being the only woman in an esports team and having to train and be in their company for an extended period of time…
It becomes a vicious cycle too, because you don’t reach the world class level without slogging through a lot of shit on your way there. Having dedicated spaces to play and compete in peace goes a long way towards minimizing the day-to-day bullshit.
Besides the sexism, as with Chess, there isn’t a lot of social networking for women in games at the highest level because it’s a society and culture built by, for, and dominated by men, with all the disadvantages that brings.