"She's ugly. Ugly slut. F--- slut." And the more she wins on the first-person shooting game, the worse the comments become. "Being beaten by a female, I guess they kind of feel like they need to compensate somewhere," she said. "Maybe something inside them gets a little mad and they have to let it out in some shape or form." That's a view backed up by a new study published in the online scientific journal PLOS ONE and co-authored by UNSW's Dr Michael Kasumovic​. The study recorded results of 163 games of the online first-person shooter game Halo 3. In half of the games, messages were broadcast to players in a female voice, while in the other half the voice was male. Negative and positive comments directed towards the test player were then recorded.

The female voice received more than twice the number of insults as the male voice. And the worse a male teammate played, the more likely he was to insult the female-voiced player. The graph demonstrates that the lower the skill level of a man, the less positive he is towards a female player. For men playing with men, this doesn't make a difference. Credit:PLOS One "When men interacted with men who were better than them, they would behave in a submissive manner. But when women were outperforming them, they became more aggressive," Kasumovic said. Statements directed at women included phrases such as "Shut up, you whore," and "Should have made me a sandwich, bitch."

Kasumovic said the vitriolic men were motivated by fear of losing their place in the "social hierarchy". "They're trying to diminish women's status because if you have a woman with a higher status, not only are you lower status, but other men perceive you as lower status. And from a cultural perspective, that can be very shocking to a man," he said. Research in 2014 found almost half of all gamers were female. But not a single female voice was heard in the 163 games used in the study, apart from the pre-recorded voice used by the researchers. "If they did talk, they'd probably get harassed," Sandy said. "That's what I used to do, not talk because I'd be harassed." Sometimes things went too far the other way, too. Sandy said men would often pursue her online once they discovered she was a woman.

"They want to be friends with you, play games with you, just because you're a female. I don't want to deal with that. I don't want to talk to some random person," she said. "On the whole I've always wanted to be treated as just another guy playing." Kasumovic said that sort of experience was common for women playing online. "They receive negative comments, but also unwanted positive comments. Often the attention is, 'Wow, it's wonderful to see a girl playing'. It's not behaviour men would have towards other men," he said. He said that for male behaviour to change, men had to recognise that women could be better than them at online shooters and that that wasn't a bad thing.

"Just because you lose to a woman – it's not bad – but for a lot of men, from a cultural perspective, that's still very difficult to accept," he said. Over the years she'd been playing online, Sandy said things had improved. She puts it down to the increased visibility of women in the gaming space, with the growth of video platforms like YouTube and streaming service Twitch. She said women needed to make content and keep being seen online to normalise female gamers. "It's more accepted now because there's content being produced and you can see that females do play, and they are normal, and they're just as competitive as males as well. So I think the introduction of more of that is what's helped it," she said. You can take a look at competitive gameplay from Sandy below: