This weekend the best Fortnite players in the world gathered at Flushing Meadows in New York to compete in the game’s first ever World Cup Finals for $30m (£24m) in prize money. Tens of thousands of spectators packed the famed Arthur Ashe stadium to watch the action live, and many millions more viewed on Twitch and YouTube. Fortnite is, after all, one of the biggest entertainment brands on the planet, played by hundreds of millions. Amid all the hype and fanfare around the finals, however, one depressing fact remained unavoidable: not a single one of the 100 finalists was female.

Despite the growing popularity of professional gaming throughout the world – the audience figures for competitive gaming have reached 450m this year – female competitors remain scarce. There certainly are high-profile examples of female pros – trans woman Sasha “Scarlett” Hostyn is one of the most successful Starcraft II players in the world; Katherine “Mystik” Gunn is the industry’s highest-paid female pro gamer and won the SyFy channel’s reality TV show WCG Ultimate Gamer; and Fortnite has stars such as One_Shot_Gurl and Loeya. But you could watch a year of big tournaments, whether it’s Call of Duty, League of Legends or Hearthstone, and count the number of female competitors on the fingers of one hand.

If things are to improve, the onus is on the game publishers, event organisers, big-name sponsors and team owners

This isn’t because women and girls aren’t playing games. The latest figures from the Entertainment Software Association show that 46% of gamers are women – a figure reflected in several other recent studies. The female audience for esports is also growing: figures collected by Nielsen suggest that almost a quarter of the pro gaming audience is female, and in some parts of the world it’s much higher. So why aren’t we seeing that reflected in the Fortnite World Cup?

The easy answer is because no women qualified. The heats were entirely open and held online over 10 weeks – more than 40m players competed with no restrictions on age or gender. The pro gaming scene likes to present itself as a meritocracy, where pure talent is all that matters.

This may be true in terms of the abstract qualifying rules, but the real issue goes deeper and its about why women are under-represented across the esports spectrum.

Quick Guide What is Fortnite? Show What is Fortnite: Battle Royale In short, it's a mass online brawl where 100 players leap out of a flying bus on to a small island and then fight until only one is left. Hidden around are weapons and traps, and players must arm themselves while exploring. When was it released? Fortnite started in July 2017 as a four-player cooperative survival game, but the game's developer, Epic, noticed the huge success of PC title PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds (PUBG), which pits 100 players against each other, and decided to release a new version. How much does it cost? The game is free and players are able to unlock new items as they progress without paying anything. A Premium Battle Pass gives access to exclusive clothing and items. However there is an in-game currency, V-Bucks, which players can use to buy additional custom gear. It is how this currency is paid for that has become the centre of a dispute between Fortnite's makers and Apple and Google. Why is it so popular with kids? It's free, it's fun, and it has a very silly, offbeat sense of humour. While PUBG has a serious, realistic visual style, Fortnite: Battle Royale has very bright, almost cartoon-like graphics, as well as loads of ridiculous items and costumes, such as space suits and dinosaur outfits. Players can pull a variety of dance moves, and team up with a friend to compete as a duo or a squad. Participants can chat as they play using headsets and microphones. Is there violence? And is it addictive? Although Fortnite is a multiplayer shooter, it does not depict bloody violence. It takes lots of enjoyable gameplay concepts from more mature shooting games but places them in a non-threatening, non-realistic world. In terms of addictiveness, Fortnite contains nothing that makes it different from other action video games. It's more that the game contains many different elements – nice visuals, good shooting mechanics, an interesting building component and lots of support and interest from YouTubers – into one package that is free to download. Photograph: fortnite

Partly it’s down to the culture of “hardcore” video game communities, which are overwhelmingly dominated by young men and as a consequence, often unwelcoming to women. Trash talk is a standard in most online competitive games, and can often cross over into misogynistic insults. Rare is the female gamer who plays with unrestricted voice chat. Even when they’re simply playing online with a group of strangers, women players are sometimes belittled and objectified, their abilities constantly questioned. Meanwhile, the sponsorship and marketing of events is highly focused on male viewers – it’s all energy drinks and ads for ridiculously macho gaming joypads, keyboards and mice with names like Viper and Hyperion.

When women do compete, they can find themselves under disproportionate and unwelcome scrutiny. In June, a 15-year-old girl entered a tournament in New York based around the Nintendo game Super Smash Bros and promptly beat a top pro player. She was subsequently hounded and bullied online by his fans. Tweeting under her gaming tag, Bocchi, she claimed to be considering leaving the tournament circuit because of the abuse she received.

you won't be able to find me as bocchi. I'm sorry to everyone who looks up to me and likes me but i can't do this anymore. All this stress, all this torture just because people like me and its a game. Im sorry. Goodbye. — bocchi (@bocchibelle) July 3, 2019

This is a longstanding problem: in 2016, when the BBC interviewed pro gamer Steph Harvey for its 100 Women series, she stated: “It’s still a ‘boys’ club’ so as a woman you’re automatically judged for being different. The way I get harassed is about what they would do to my body, about why I don’t deserve to be there because I use my sexuality – it’s all extremely graphic.”

Earlier this year, Susie Kim, then manager of the London Spitfires team of professional Overwatch players, was asked by the Associated Press if women were good enough to play at the highest levels. “Absolutely,” she said. “But they’re just like, ‘It’s a headache. I don’t want to be part of this at all.’ I don’t blame them.” Even women who make it into well-known professional esports teams are subject to abuse and belittlement. In June, streamer and pro player Lunarkats, who creates content for the Lazurus team, tweeted a video of her playing Counter Strike Global Offensive online and receiving sexualised abuse from her own team-mates.

"lunar will suck you" "are you gay? maybe he's just gay" "he or she or it? do you have a dick or vagina?" "maybe its gender fluid" "i would rather be dead than be a girl" "see you on Reddit...top page stop girl harassment haha"

pugs are amazing pic.twitter.com/UoRXDD55jr — Katherine 🌙 (@lunarkats) June 18, 2019

In some ways, the lack of female pro players also reflects an imbalance in traditional sports. Most surveys show that teenage girls drop out of competitive sports at 1.5 to two times the rate of boys, with the Women’s Sports Foundation citing a variety of causes, including fewer opportunities, safety issues, social stigma and lack of positive role models, and in esports the same factors are at play.

One solution has been to set up female-only leagues and competitions, allowing young women players a less toxic environment in which to hone their skills and compete. However, this has proved controversial, with some seeing sex-based partitioning as a means of sidelining and undervaluing women players: unlike in traditional sports, there are no physical differences at play to justify gender segregation. There is a lingering belief that young men are simply better at games than women, and though there is little detailed research in this area (a study in 2016 from the University of California found that gender had little or no relevance in terms of ability in a range of fantasy role-playing games), the sociocultural barriers, online gatekeeping and suspicion with which female competitors are greeted are the more obvious barriers to their greater success right now.

If things are to improve, the onus is on the game publishers, event organisers, big-name sponsors and team owners to attract and employ more female gamers, to challenge the sometimes sexist culture of the competitive gaming scene through better moderation and stiffer penalties for abuse (for pros as well as amateurs), and to pay well-known female players the same as their male counterparts.

Fortnite is in a good position to attract more female professionals. It already has a much larger female audience than most online shooters, with Epic estimating that women make up 35% of the game’s user base, perhaps because it’s a much brighter, funnier and more friendly game than other highly militarised online shooters and it’s free and available on smartphones, which has made it more accessible. Epic has also endeavoured to attract and support female streamers and pro-players, inviting several high-profile YouTube and Twitch stars such as One_Shot_Gurl, Alexia Raye, LoserFruit and Ewok to take place in the pro-celebrity matches that proceeded the World Cup games.

Though esports revenues are set to hit $1bn this year, it remains a young and immature industry. Working out best practices in terms of encouraging gender diversity is a challenge that will affect every publisher and event organiser in the world over the coming years if growth is to be maintained – even for the creators of the biggest entertainment franchise on the planet. One of the most moving moments of the Fortnite World Cup weekend was when the major esports team Faze Clan introduced its newest signing and first ever female player, Ewok, to the rest of the squad, leading to raucous celebrations.

As esports get bigger and bigger, it would be a tragic waste to replicate the institutional biases affecting traditional sport, where women are both represented less and paid less. Gaming is supposed to be a modern, forward-looking industry and esports is an exciting sector that’s rocketing in popularity and influence – now is the time to act.

• Keith Stuart is an author and journalist