Being lousy at videogames might make you more of a jerk.

To better understand the roots of misogyny, a pair of researchers examined the gender dynamics of players interacting in Halo 3. In a study published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE, Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff found that sexism in the male-dominated environment of Halo seemed to have more to do with the skill of the guys and their status within the game than with any women playing the game.

"It's the fear of losing to a woman that kind of irks a lot of men," Kasumovic, a professor at the University of New South Wales, says. "As a consequence, they lash out in an attempt to remove women from the competitive playing field.”

In other words, men who may already be losing in the game don’t like women encroaching on their turf—and their tactic of choice can be harassment.

Don't Want to Compete

Kasumovic and Kuznekoff, an assistant professor at Miami University Middletown, examined data from an earlier study that featured three kinds of players each teaming up with others in the hugely popular multiplayer shooter Halo 3. Game play was recorded to allow the researchers to analyze the results.

Each player would say a few phrases to his or her teammates. The key difference between them was perceived gender: the "control" player didn’t speak, the “man” interacted by speaking with a prerecorded male voice, and the "woman" interacted by speaking with a prerecorded female voice. (The prerecorded phrases were the same innocuous statements like "Nice shot there" for each gender.) The goal was to see how players would interact with—and the kinds of comments that would be made towards—the male-voiced player versus the female-voiced player.

The results were striking.

“Men who were of lower skill were more positive towards men and more negative towards women,” Kasumovic says, remarking on the kinds of comments made towards the study's players. “But the really neat result is that when men were of higher skill, they were much more positive to women.”

While Kasumovic acknowledges it’s difficult to determine the superlative players' motivation—are they so good that they're not concerned about losing, or so confident in their skill that they aren't bothered by the possibility of losing—the results still seem to demonstrate a notable difference in behavior between men of different skill levels.

"It's not just what men are doing to women, but what men are doing to women relative to what they're doing to men," Kasumovic says. And it seems men who are losing aren't happy to have to compete with women, too.

More Than Just a Game

So does this kind of dynamic hold sway beyond the virtual world of Master Chief? Kasumovic certainly thinks so.

“Think about STEM fields, for example, or construction, or medical professions, " he says. "Wherever there's going to be a male bias sex ratio, there'll probably be this strong hierarchy and a very aggressive way for men to ensure their status above women.”

Certain factors may have created a more heightened environment for negative comments as observed in the study. Players in Halo 3 are anonymous. They may not interact with the same specific players again. And they may care most about winning, more than, say, how their behavior impacts others.

Real life is a lot more complicated. After all, even in male-dominated workplaces, people must interact with the same colleagues every day, which can deter aggressive or hateful behavior. But the world of Halo is a lot closer to the worlds of popular social networks, such as Reddit and Twitter, where users can shield themselves through anonymity. While it's hard to generalize about such huge communities, Kasumovic cautions, some of the conditions are similar.

For environments where sexism does hold sway, online or off, Kasumovic says we need to think about how they're structured to understand what changes could make the situation better. “The first solution would be to minimize or eradicate a hierarchy," he says.

"If you think about a competition, or videogames, it's all about hierarchy," he adds. But in workplaces especially, he says those hierarchies should be minimized. "That has the potential to promote equality—not just between men and women, but between everyone.”