Varsity esports programs are rapidly expanding onto the collegiate scene, but women players are being left behind, according to a North Carolina State University (NCSU) study, “Gender and the Two-Tiered System of Collegiate Esports,” published earlier this month.
While casual, club-level esports teams remain diverse, the study found that varsity-level teams — notably those which are typically well-funded and more likely to offer scholarships and other academic benefits akin to those offered by traditional sports programs — remain “overwhelmingly male-dominated.”
The popularity and professionalization of esports, also known as competitive video gaming, has ballooned into a billion dollar industry in the 
But it’s precisely this type of “gold rush,” as one program director called it, that is fueling such gender disparity, argues the study. When seeing programs as “high stake investments,” colleges “are eager to field winning teams,” according to the study. And in the race to create a winning team, the study explains, colleges and universities have often relied on professional esports culture to provide them with top-tier players.
But there’s a problem with that strategy, explains the study’s co-author Dr. Nicholas Taylor, an associate professor of communications at NCSU.
“When you leave it up to esports culture to produce really good players — which is what collegiate varsity programs are doing — then you are letting in all of the cultural conditions that make it really hard for women to participate in the first place,” said Taylor, listing examples such as less access to leisure time, fear of harassment and the long-standing stereotypes between not only gaming and masculinity but computers and masculinity.
“We’re importing the values of professional esports in wholesale, without thinking critically about what those values mean and do in a higher education context,” he added.
