The BBC published yet another mainstream esports article criticizing the industry this week, this time focusing on the charged topic of women’s participation. This topic has been discussed before, and it’s one that I’ve consistently avoided. Just because I happen to be a woman in the industry doesn’t mean my personal experiences speak for everyone or that I can presume to generalize the work of a writer or analyst to someone who commentates, manages, coaches, hosts or plays a game professionally, so being someone who works in the industry and coincidentally also happens to be a woman doesn’t necessarily qualify me to comment on the topic at large more than any man who works in the industry.

Since most articles on the topic have lacked due diligence in research or fact and have been mostly speculative, however, I felt qualified to at least contribute to the discussion. Whatever the reasoning provided for a lack of women in esports, the presumed industry-created barriers are minimal. Regardless of our reasoning, if more women want to succeed in esports, they will, and it's no one else's responsibility to make that happen.

A common thread of trying to explain why there aren’t more female-sexed esports professionals keeps re-emerging. The BBC would like to paint the picture of women bullied out of the scene by constant harassment and a pay disparity, focusing on unreliable statistics to create a gender pay gap without providing rigor or explanation. This offence has already been covered in brief by Paul "Redeye" Chaloner, so I won’t dwell on it.

While I can’t presume to know the complete answer as to why fewer women become esports professionals, one can at least explain some of it by looking at the player base of popular esports games. While publications love to throw around the statistic that more than 50 percent of gamers are women, esports games are a much more specific subculture. And, the most popular esports games, League of Legends, Counter Strike: Global Offensive and DotA 2, have a smaller female-to-male distribution than what we’re told is the overall gaming standard.

Very few statistics on player bases are consistent. The last official source I can find from Riot Games on League of Legends' player demographic is from 2013, and it reports a player base which is over 90 percent male. Alex Internet posted a survey demonstrating 18 percent of Steam users (Steam being the primary portal for accessing both DotA 2 and CS:GO) are female and eSports Bets reported figures in 2015 of around 20 percent for DotA 2 and CS:GO, estimating a larger female player base for LoL. An April survey on the League of Legends subreddit, which would arguably host the more hardcore LoL fans, had 11 percent of users self-identify as women, with about four percent of those self-identifying as women over the age of 21.

I won't belabor reasons for the small female player base, but at least early marketing of video games was primarily geared toward boys. That's slowly changing, but it doesn't mean all games will be (or should be) marketed toward girls or that, even if they are, the amount of girls playing these games will increase over night.

A smaller player base of girls or women playing popular esports games is consistent with a lower representation of women finding careers in the esports industry. This is a topic that many articles examining the issue love to skirt or overlook, citing harassment or differences in biology that are supposed to make women more risk or competition averse.

That’s not to say that a smaller female user base completely explains the participation of women in esports-related careers or the jobs they choose to take. It’s still more common to see a woman succeed in a hosting or journalistic role, and we’re far from the conservative 10 percent estimate of women participating in top esports teams, but the question is whether this disparity is dire enough to warrant the constant question of, "Why?"

With the inclusion of all-female tournaments and teams, many women who are players have received a lot more exposure than they would have were they men of similar skill level in an esports title. Overwatch currently boasts high-ranked female players on its servers. The Chinese League of Legends servers have had transient female players between Challenger and Master, and women have, at least at lower levels like local City of Heroes qualifier tournaments in China or European National Leagues, competed occasionally with men. SMITE, at least, has seen a woman coach.

I’m sure I’ve left out several potential examples given my limited scope in esports, but a handful is all that’s needed to demonstrate that the esports community already makes room for women, as it has made room for individuals with a variety of backgrounds and circumstances as long as they can play the game well. I'm dubious that heavy pushes to increase awareness of women in esports have significantly influenced this considering that, in some cases, all-female tournaments, particularly in China, have descended to pageant-like displays where women are judged for their appearances or simply mocked and ridiculed by their audience. The spreading of misinformation by articles like the one published by the BBC likely also hasn’t helped either since they tend to characterize the esports community as exclusive and hateful, which logically would accomplish the opposite of encouraging women to try to succeed in the industry.

None of this is to dismiss claims made that women in esports experience harassment. Being a minority or an oddity under the spotlight will often generate a lot of attention, both positive and negative. Within a game, self-identifying as female or using voice chat will invite ridicule, regardless of expressed skill, but in a more public sphere, putting one’s self in the spotlight will always engender some form of harassment.

My male colleagues have anecdotally shared some of their own experiences of harassment with me, and I can’t come up with a fair comparison regarding the overall volume of harassment they get relative to the average woman, only that the nature of it differs. Women are more likely to receive comments about their appearance or which focus on the fact that they’re women before they’re judged for their ideas, but by virtue of making any kind of public presence, one is likely to draw ire. The content and type may differ, but mockery is a universal language and one to which the public is entitled. It's more an expectation than a barrier.

Certain games have also been traditionally marketed more toward men, and this is an area that I find difficult to comment on considering female-targeted marketing is something that has rarely, if ever, made a product more appealing to me. I don’t necessarily want developers to alter games I already enjoy to include more elements that allegedly will appeal more to a broader audience of women when most would say the current core audience in gaming is growing on its own. The number of female players may increase without the esports industry itself making any effort, as people in the public sphere continue to debate how to harness the "girl gamer audience."

The crux of the problem with most of these articles is that, sometimes, needing to explain "why" there aren’t more women in esports makes it easier for women to blame their own biology and circumstances for their lack of success. Until more definitive research is done on the topic, I perceive that as the creation of barriers or excuses that make simply not trying easier. One line in the BBC article struck me much more glaringly than the context of misinformation presented.

"The rarity of female gamers turning professional is also connected, Steph believes, to the history of games development which has seen the creation of games dominated by men and so despite e-sports not being physical 'they focus on spatial awareness and reflexes, skills often stronger for men,' Steph says."

Stephanie "Missharvey" Harvey, competes on CLG Red in Counter Strike: Global Offensive. While she no doubt has her reasons for stating that a lack of female developers contributing to the idea that games emphasize traditionally male skills that are fundamentally biological, I object to exploring only her line of reasoning to the exclusion of others.

Traditional study on brain development has supported that things like spacial awareness and reflexes are higher in the male population. More recent studies have suggested that actual consistent biological differences are rather small and only zero to eight percent of brains contain all "male" or all "female" characteristics. Part of this is that physical brain development is heavily influenced by environment, and our environment is certainly changing.

Neuro-science is still a constantly changing field, and traditional research emphasizes the existence of at least some small biological brain differences between males and females. As I am not a neuro-scientist, I can’t produce work to substantiate or refute new or traditional research, but by accepting the idea that male brains are traditionally more predisposed toward higher levels of reflexes or spacial awareness, one must also accept that there are skills to which female brains are more traditionally suited.

I can't speak to the strength of recent studies against a back drop of much more long-standing and conventional research in the field. But according to that older research, female brains can transition between tasks and multi-task more easily, meaning they can react to a change of circumstances more efficiently and keep track of a larger volume of information in a big picture rather than tunneling. Women are more predisposed to being able to sit still for longer periods of time. Findings that support that women tend to have more verbal centers in the brain also suggest that they can communicate better verbally. All of these are skills that should give women their own advantages in gaming or a team setting, but are overlooked by the assumption that games emphasize only male-brained qualities. As no research has been done specifically to see how these differences may translate into esports-related skills, one cannot over-value certain qualities to the exclusion of others.

Whether or not skills games emphasize will change over time with the inclusion of more female game developers is a topic that only time can broach, but the idea that women won’t be able to compete until there are women game developers is fundamentally an excuse. No doubt Missharvey didn’t intend for this statement to come across this way, but whether consciously or not, she’s created an excuse for women to avoid attempts to compete or enter the esports industry. Playing games well at the highest level is difficult for everyone, and it should be; if women want to compete and work hard to hone the skills to do so, they don't need to mentally add more reasons for it to be harder before definitive evidence indicates otherwise.

Harassment of women in esports exists. There are more male role models than female — this, again, is something that doesn’t bother me personally, as I have no problem finding men in my field admirable or inspiring simply because they are men. In fact, I find the idea that I need someone to look like me to accomplish something before I can consider it vaguely insulting. Games and advertising are still designed with a primarily male audience in mind. There are no doubt critics who will look at women entering the field differently than they would men. Biological circumstances could make efforts harder, though they haven't been proven to be prohibitive. None of these are hard reasons women can't succeed. Nothing in the industry is actually preventing women from competing with men in esports.

It isn’t easy for women to succeed in a field where they’re a minority — whatever that reason might be — or they wouldn’t be a minority. But asking "why" in a climate that women can gradually change on their own merit can be counterproductive.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Hu Niu (Tigress), the manager of Oh My Girls, an all-girls League of Legends team in China. She said, "The eventual goal is for the girls to compete with the boys... We want them to receive offers from boys' teams."

In all likelihood, because of the rarity of high-ranked female pros in general, the front-runners of women pro gamers won’t debut on a major stage as part of all-girls organizations. There's nothing wrong with creating all-female teams in the meantime if the goal of the team is actually to play seriously and improve, but women who succeed at the highest level in esports, at least initially, will likely have to do so alone without the support of several other women making the jump at the same time. StarCraft II's Sasha "Scarlett" Hostyn and League of Legends' Maria "Sakuya" Creveling certainly didn't wait on others to start making the climb.

There’s a reason that, in history, "firsts" are always remembered. The first man to discover America. The first man to fly. The first professional esports player. If being one of the "first" were easy, these individuals wouldn’t make history. It may be a personal challenge, but the esports industry doesn’t have massive barriers preventing women from succeeding. Women who want to and can succeed will enter the field and make names for themselves without anyone else having to do anything. Women, despite reports of supposedly greater risk aversion than men, aren’t so afraid of risk that, in the long run, they’ll all consistently turn down a chance at glory.

In a recent interview of women pro gamers and other industry figures by Red Bull, Victoria "Vicksy" Doman, a female League of Legends player, said, "There's nothing that is holding women back in eSports. If there is a girl that is good enough and wants to compete at high levels, she will do it regardless."

Women aren’t victims waiting for the industry to change to save them or accommodate them. Until someone proves otherwise, my strongest answer to the question of "why" there aren't already more women succeeding in esports is, simply, time.

Kelsey Moser is a staff writer for theScore esports. You can follow her on Twitter.