Gender Bias

[GameBanshee News]

Gamers with Jobs has an interesting editorial up debunking one of those studies that has concluded men are more apt to become addicted to gaming.

"The females 'got' the game, and they moved the wall in the direction you would expect," said Reiss, who is director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Brain Sciences Research. "They appeared motivated to succeed at the game. The males were just a lot more motivated to succeed."

This strikes me as a rather unscientific conclusion to draw. First off, I have a problem generally with small sample size studies. Yes, I understand that a carefully constructed small sample can have huge statistical significance. But even though I understand confidence intervals and Z-scores, I can't get around the fact that we are talking about 22 people here. How were they selected? How many of them play games on a regular basis? I can guarantee you that if I sit a non-gamer down with a "generic" reaction-time and mouse-accuracy game next to one of the Gamers With Jobs crazy-good Team Fortress 2 players, the non-gamer is just along for the ride.
(...)
The findings indicate, the researchers said, that successfully acquiring territory in a computer game format is more rewarding for men than for women. And Reiss, for one, isn't surprised. "I think it's fair to say that males tend to be more intrinsically territorial," he said. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out who historically are the conquerors and tyrants of our species—they're the males."

And here, ladies and gentlemen, is our Fox News moment. We've gone from "we found 11 guys who are good at games" to the tired old saw of "men destroy everything" in one quote. No, I don't have a long list of female torturers and tin pot dictators to rebut with. But I do think that one-liners like this coming from the supposed cognoscenti do nothing to help the world understand the subtlety of human history, to say nothing of the world of videogames.

[Siberys]

They also need to look at how much women have to put up with just in todays standards.

Guy makes 100 bucks a day, and 500 a week, makes a decent living in his apartment, not great but decent. He can afford to slack off on the weekends and use some extra money from his job to buy a couple games and spend the time to get interested in them.

Girl has exact same job, but only makes 70 bucks a day and 350 a week, barely making ends meet on payments of any kind. She only makes 70 bucks compared to the guy, why? Because women almost always get paid less due to guys still stereotyping them enough to have them make 70 cents to a guys dollar.

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Now lets imagine if they made an equal amount of money, and lets assume the guy and girl are together.

Same situation, but if we're going into stereotypes, this means the woman cooks, cleans, raises the kids, and works full time at her job, the man still does the same thing, slacks off on the weekend with video games.



This is why the argument doesn't work. It's not because women are not more apt to get addicted, it's that in a stereotypically judged world like this argument, women CAN'T get addicted. But because the stereotype is significantly less than it was say a decade or two ago when video games were booming in the industry, this argument about men versus women in video game addiction is severely flawed.