Gender Equality in Esports Organizations

Esports is developing as a new form of digital sport combining practices and cultural backgrounds from digital gaming and traditional sports. It is gaining huge popularity and viewership that bypasses many traditional sport forms and creating new, highly profitable opportunities for sporting events, broadcasts, and merchandising. However, Esports is still lacking in sustainable organizational structures and equal opportunities for all participants. Research shows that in Esports, women and those representing marginalized gender identities experience gender-based discrimination and harassment as players, earn smaller prize pools than men, and are underrepresented in the industry due to discriminatory hiring processes. These issues and their potential solutions are partially similar in Esports and traditional sports. However, as a new form of sport, Esports has a unique opportunity to create new, more equitable practices on its digital playing field. This chapter examines how questions of gender equality in Esports are connected to organizational development and how they are present in various ways on different levels of Esports organizations, from grassroots and educational contexts to (inter)national representatives and businesses. It highlights the impacts individual organizations across the Esports ecosystem can have on promoting gender equality and includes research-based recommendations for implementing good practices.