It’s as safe as the Bank of England. Once you come up with the topic of women in esports, it doesn’t take long before someone claims “women are just not good enough,” or “women struggle under pressure,” or “if women can beat men, why don’t we see any?” Every time I come across sentiments like this, I wonder if the clocks were set back a century.

When The Esports Observer published an article about SKYLLA, a new tournament organizer aiming to normalize competition between women and men in CS:GO, some of our readers were coming up with arguments mentioned above. And I admit, they have a point when they state this:

“Females are allowed to go into CEVO and ESEA ladders with no separation. They never end up getting good results out of it.”

It’s only a part of the truth, though. To really examine the reasons and circumstances of a skewed gender representation among top tier pro-players, we must go beyond individuals and take a look at the bigger picture. My main thesis: success in esports is about conditions, not about gender.

There is bias

In the past, video games were populated by men, sitting alone in mom’s basement, playing between chunks of cold pizza and stale Coke. And let’s be real. For the longest time, video game competitions were pubertal testosterone-impregnated sausage fests. Understandably, a LAN environment leaves many women feel uncomfortable. Today, it’s basically still the same.

Interestingly, research on the topic of women in tech suggests that young women don’t choose tech careers because they think:

they are not interested they are not good at it they will be working with a number of people that they just wouldn’t feel comfortable or happy working alongside

The same is true for esports. Because women don’t have the numbers, they are not on par with men in esports—yet.

Still don’t get it? Well think about this one. The United States has more olympic gold medals than Ireland. But guess what? New York City alone has more inhabitants than the Irish islands. And who else is on the top of the board when it comes to earning most medals in the Olympics? Right, it’s Russia. Just a coincidence or maybe a competitive advantage due to the sheer size of its population?

The gamer demography has changed rapidly, though. The ratio between women and men playing video games is equaling out. More and more women are getting interested.

Population isn’t everything however. Culture is the second key factor. A lot of young talented women who are aspiring a pro-player career are confronted with sentiments of “you’re not good enough,” and the overall feeling of “we don’t want you.” It’s a well-recorded psychological phenomenon. A group identity shapes itself in distinction to outsiders. Coming from a male-dominated culture of video games, esports always was and predominantly still is hostile to women. The infantile “grill”-meme the Twitch chat spams every time a women is visible on stream is only the tip of the iceberg.

Just listen to Lydia Picknell speaking about the challenges women face in esports, and the threats she’s received as a coach for the Australian SMITE team Avant Garde:

And that’s devastating of course. Not only for the individual but for the whole industry.

Diversity has been identified as a key driver for innovation and business growth, time and time again. Acknowledge, embrace, and nurture female competition can only be the first step for esports diversity. Social inclusion can’t stop there. And to be honest, we have a once in a lifetime opportunity to handle things differently than traditional sports, tech, or entertainment.

Esports is universal. It doesn’t need distinction as to race, sex, or whatsoever. All it needs is fair competition.

And a fair competition includes equal chances right from the start.

It is hard to tell if we should or should not give an advantage to women in order to equal out the chances. You can’t call a 100-meters-race a fair competition, if one runner starts ahead of the other. But ignoring the fact that women and men are not on the same standing before the competition even starts is completely wrong.

That’s why I argue we need to give women the same starting conditions as men. And no, it’s not enough to only allow entrance for everybody to claim it’s fair. As long as there is a group of competitors starting with heavy disadvantage, it’s not fair, it’s a farce.

We need to work in order to find a solution to equal out the cultural disadvantage without destroying competitive fairness. Getting rid of the prejudice that women won’t do as well as men would be a good start.

Women are no threat to esports, they won’t take us men anything away. Instead, they will make our sport better in the long run. To achieve that, we have to build bridges. We need to stop pointing a finger and start holding out our hand.