- We suggest that low-status males increase female-directed hostility to minimize the loss of status as a consequence of hierarchical reconfiguration resulting from the entrance of a woman into the competitive arena. Higher-skilled players, in contrast, were more positive towards a female relative to a male teammate.
This is awesome. It's great to see data and analysis sharing catching on in science. I might go play with their data for fun. #overlyhonestresearchmethods Update: downloaded their data and did a bit of plotting. This is absolutely fascinating. The difference in negative comments toward women is really stark when you do a median split by skill level (as measured by their "MaxSkillLevel" variable). Here is the figure for both experimenter types. When the experimenter is male, there is no difference in negative comments by commenter skill level. But when the experimenter is female, low-skilled males make more negative comments than high-skilled males: This next bit is particularly interesting. Here, I have the skill level of the person making the comment marked by color, and have experimenter skill level divided in the two columns. Here we can see that the effect is mainly driven by experimenter skill; when a female experimenter is highly skilled, low-skilled males make more negative comments. Fascinating!Data are available as supplementary information (S1 Dataset) and the data and R script are on Github (https://github.com/latrodektus/VG_Sexism).
We stopped at 163 as this is a substantial time effort.
Heh, they even did the guys a favor by removing the worst examples, and it still came out this bad.For the examination of negative statements, there were two focal players in the female-voiced manipulation that made 10 more negative statements than the next highest individuals (greater than 5 standard deviations from the mean). As a result, we removed them from our analysis to ensure they did not skew our results towards significance.
So I note that there was no way to control for age; I'm not sure that matters but when there's a negative correlation between skill and disrespect it does make one wonder if there's a positive correlation between skill and age. Not to excuse terrible behavior but when it's so male-dominated that the girls aren't even speaking, it seems plausible that the younger demo skews even more male and teenaged male FPS players are... uncouth, as a broad stereotype. This seems like a good time to share an open letter from Aisha Tyler.A total of 189 players spoke in these 102 games; all of them were male. This is not to say that women did not play, just that they did not speak. This does, however, reinforce the fact that women are entering a
very male dominated environment.
Age is interesting and I wish it could be controlled, though I can't imagine how it would be. I can't help but wonder if because an older player is more likely to be established in real life, they're less likely to be threatened by being less skilled. That said I know that even in games with an older demographic like World of Warcraft (it's unfortunately a decade out of date, but Nick Yee found the average age of a WoW player to be 28. I played heavily from around 2006 until 2012 or so and I definitely saw my female guild mates be singled out by other players. It got to the point that most of them wouldn't talk over voice chat, even during closed times where there shouldn't be anything threatening or demeaning directed at them. It was unfortunately just easier and safer for them to not draw attention to themselves. What this article made me think about, and found kind of interesting, is that the more skilled a player was, the less likely she was to speak in voice chat. I can't help but wonder if that means they were targets of even more abuse, as they eclipsed players that were normally not threatened.
I want to start by saying they definitely make some good points in the intro and the study itself but I'm a little confused on how this study can be conclusive in any way for significantly more hostility towards the female-voice vs male. The frequency of positive comments and negative towards both male and female voice both had P values that showed significance but the results for negativity towards male vs female didn't as far as I saw (it's late here so I may have missed them though :), will re-read in the morning). Also, this sample size is really small for trying to draw conclusion about such a large and varied demographic such as gamers. Which can be problematic because the results of the study have already caught like wild-fire and I'm seeing them on many different websites. The problem with this is that now not only are gamers all going to be generalized and painted as hostile mysoginists, sensasionalizing findings like this IMO will push female gamers away from the gaming. I'm not saying I don't think that the issues of an industry and the problems with the behaviors in gaming and the environment shouldn't be brought to light, I would just hope for more conclusive and realistic results. I'm also confused by the discussion where they say this.... "Since there were a greater number of negative statements within the female manipulation, we examined whether these statements could be considered hostile sexism [32]. Of the 82 players in the female manipulation playing on the same team as the experimental player, only 11 individuals (13%) uttered hostile sexist statements. As a result of this small sample size, we only examined whether the presence of hostile sexist statements was affected by individual performance relative to the experimental player. We found that the presence of sexist statements was not determined by differences in maximum skill achieved (χ2 = 1.70, p = 0.19), the number of deaths (χ2 = 0.57, p = 0.45) or the number of kills (χ2 = 2.25, p = 0.13) relative to the experimental player." Does that mean skill was in fact not correlated? I may have just misunderstood the findings and the significance of them. I also clearly see from this study (and just in general) that gaming is a safer environment (in terms of negativity/harassment) for men than women. I just feel like the findings of this study are being blown out of proportion and creating a image of gamers/gaming that isn't beneficial to either female or male gamers.
Yes, for the sexist statements. It was the negative statements where they found the effect. They only had about 10 or so instances of sexist comments anyway so it's pretty difficult to tell. So it's more about general negativity towards females instead of 'outright' sexism.Does that mean skill was in fact not correlated?
This is tagged as feminism? Interesting topic but that part confuses me.
The paper attempts to determine a structural cause for an observed behaviour towards women. Why wouldn't that be #feminism?
Huh... I must be good at gaming then... Cuz I don't really see a difference in male or female gamers.
Honestly, in most games I just see the "omg is a real girl" reaction and then everyone wants to be their friend as though they were going to get to sleep with this person through the internet. It's kinda funny to watch.
I don't disagree with that. Although I don't think that is the intention of the majority to exile females from games. People are trolls in competitive games. They will say anything they think will get under your skin. It's a tactic for getting into your enemies head. If you can make someone lose their cool, they lose focus and that gives you an edge. Not saying is okay. Just saying trolls will be trolls. Don't let it get to you.
That is true. People will fuck with anyone they can get to though. I don't think I have played more than a handful of competitive matches where someone on my own team wasnt talking shit to me or other teammates. And I play with a few female gamers. Many times I was singled out, not them. I'm not saying people don't single out female players. I'm saying that people single out people who are easy targets and in the gaming world women are easy targets for prepubescent boys which is the group that seems to make up the majority of the competitive gaming world. I desperately want to see this study resume with different age ranges and a larger test group for each age range and see how that effects it. Without this information we are just making generalizations without knowing exactly who we are generalizing and that doesn't help anyone. Someone else spoke of this on here as well but it can actually be a detriment the spreads misinformation.
Edit: additional content As far as hitting on the first girl they hear. The internet is a place of anonymity where guys who would otherwise not have the confidence to approach a woman let alone hit on them don't have to worry about any real repercussions including hits to self-esteem. These are the same people who, because of their lack of experience with women are likely to be bigoted towards them, much of the time without realising it. There was an article about it a number of years ago but there is so much about sexism on the internet that I can't find it. Long story short it's about people's own insecurities not keeping girls out of video games.