The new data also reveals that 45% of Xbox owners and 41% of PS5 owners are female, too
This really shouldn’t be news and it certainly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but yes, new data from Circana shows that—as we told you in 2017—women play video games. In fact, more than half of all Switch owners are women. And a very vocal bunch of idiots are reacting about as well as you’d expect to this “revelation.”
it’s almost certain some of this disconnect is women just not participating in traditional gaming communities because they have to deal with dipshits constantly, yeah. i don’t know if i’d characterize all of gaming as unusually misogynistic, but it’s still probably really easy to find casual misogyny even in the best moderated gaming spaces–and a lot of gaming spaces aren’t that well moderated either
There’s also the fact that most people assume everyone else is a guy online, even if the users says otherwise. Given the misogyny you were mentioning I think a lot of the women who do stock around in gamer communities tend to not correct that assumption.
Yeah, I’m a woman in my thirties and I’ve played (on PC and console!) since I was five years old… learned a very, very long time ago that most people online would assume I was male and that it is often prudent not to correct them. So I don’t. Twenty years of conditioning telling me to keep my head down. Now that I think about it, that’s pretty sad.
I hope young girls nowadays feel more comfortable being open about their interests. Maybe I should be more open myself; I can take the hits if it makes things even a little bit easier for them.
Right. I’m a woman who as been gaming since I was about 7 years old. I have learned several strategies to make sure that I don’t draw attention to that fact. It’s always better if whoever I’m playing with assumes that I’m a dude.