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Comment by milesskorpen | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure it is fair to call video games male dominated. There are a number of game genres that are predominantly populated by women.

One big challenge is that women are so harassed on these services that they mask their gender, and make it really difficult to know what the M:F ratio actually is.

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I'm sure that's the case, but after spending a part of the weekend watching streams of EVO 2012 (world fighting game championships - probably one of the genres to be covered by the kickstarter project in question), I would say that the M:F ratio was probably more than 100:1.

On services like Xbox live and psn, it is about 90/10 male female for active players. I would call that male dominated.

For the record, I label myself male, and so do all of my female friends who play games. We all refuse to use our voices during gameplay. It's not limited to gaming, either. We've all got male-sounding handles for a number of platforms/forums/etc.

Why? Not worth the shitstorm. I'll never really understand, I guess. Just can't empathize with the overwhelming need to harass, belittle, and attack people online just because of a single identifier. I'm glad I can't. I bet it feels really empty.

Do you have a source for this number that accounts for women who have labelled themselves 'M' in order to avoid harassment? It's common among my friends to do so, which goes back to Anita's original point on misogyny having effects in games.

I haven't seen a study which addresses how many women do this, nor a clear breakdown on how many of them do it because they've experienced harassment or are just worried about it because of second-hand stories.

But if women are afraid to actually self identify as such (due to harassment), you'll never be able to get an accurate measure of the true ratio.

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