In the realm of fantasy video games, one epic monster stalks players both online and in the real world — the stereotype that men make better players than women. A new study led by a researcher at the University of California, Davis, slays that troll. 
 
 Cuihua “Cindy” Shen, an assistant professor of communication, and colleagues tracked thousands of players in two multiplayer online role-playing games and compared how quickly men and women moved from one level to the next. 
 
 Accounting for differences in playing time, character choice and membership in a players’ guild, they found that women advanced at least as fast as men. 
 
 “Once you take into account all these confounding factors, the gender differences disappear,” Shen said. “There is no gender difference.” 
 
 Shen has been analyzing massively multiplayer online game data since 2007, studying the connections between playing and a wide range of real-world behaviors. 
 
 Many gamers women, but stereotypes persist 
 
 GamerGate, the cyber harassment of female gamers and game designers that erupted in 2014, in part led her to look into sexual stereotypes, she said. 
 
 “Even though more and more women have become gamers, and more are involved in designing games, gaming communities as a whole are still very hostile toward women,” Shen said. “The prevalent stereotype is that women are not as good of players as men.” 
 
 To test that stereotype, Shen and colleagues at Michigan State University, the University of Southern California, and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, analyzed data from more than 9,000 EverQuest II players and 2,000 players of a Chinese game, Chevaliers’ Romance III. 
 
 To identify players’ gender, the researchers used the information that players reported when they registered, not the sex of the avatars they chose. 
 
 The study, reported in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, is the first to look at how male and female players’ progress over time in multiplayer games online. 
 
 Previous research has compared men’s and women’s performances in short, simple games like a car race in lab settings, but Shen said those studies did not account for differences in playing experience or gender preferences for type of games. 
 
 The research is also the first to use data from two games and two national cultures. 
 
 Shen said the findings hold real-world implications. “Why should we care about this? First of all, games have become a very important realm of our culture. Second, it has become an important entry point for people into STEM-related careers. For young girls, it has become a place for them to become familiar with the tech world.” 
 
 Females make up about 20 percent of players on multiplayer online games, she said. They are represented in even fewer numbers in the technical workforce. 
 
 “We think the stereotype that women are worse players at games could contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy,” that discourages their entry into science, technology, engineering and math fields, Shen said. 
 
 By debunking the gaming gender gap, she said, “We might be able to break the stereotype and the self-fulfilling prophecy cycle.” ||||| Although women now make up almost half of all video game players, the gaming community remains, in some ways, hostile toward women. 
 
 For example, the GamerGate controversy, which began in 2014 and involved a harassment campaign against prominent female gamers, journalists and designers, reflected a longstanding undercurrent of misogyny and sexism in the community. In some cases, those who challenged the sexism found themselves threatened with rape or death. 
 
 There’s also the long-held stereotype that men are simply better gamers than women. Women gamers are often perceived as incompetent players who aren’t genuinely interested in the games but rather sign up to get attention. If a female gamer does play well, she’s often derided as a hacker – someone who cheats to gain an advantage – because “there is no way a girl can be that good.” 
 
 In a recent study, we set out to examine whether men really make better gamers than women and, if so, what drove the gender performance gap. Specifically, we wanted to compare how quickly men and women leveled up in Massively Multiplayer Online (MMO) games, which are online worlds where thousands of players develop characters, make friends, join groups, complete quests and slay dragons together. 
 
 If men are actually better gamers than women, they should advance to higher levels within the same amount of play time. But if they don’t progress any faster, this finding would help refute one of the most pervasive stereotypes that continues to exist in the gaming community. 
 
 Getting to the next level 
 
 Our research used anonymous server data from over 10,000 men and women in two MMOs, “EverQuest II” in the United States and “Chevaliers’ Romance III” in China. We knew each player’s actual gender through their account registration information. 
 
 When players finish quests and kill monsters in MMOs, they earn experience points. When experience points reach a threshold, the player ascends to the next “level,” which unlocks new abilities, skills and access to new content. As in most video games, levels indicate a player’s progress. 
 
 Naturally, players spending a lot of time in the game are likely to reach high levels. That is why the speed of leveling up, rather than the level itself, measures performance in our study. 
 
 Before getting to our findings, we want to point out a couple of things we took into consideration. First, players who had reached the top level in the games were excluded in our analyses. Because top-level players couldn’t advance any further, their rate of leveling up was essentially zero. We removed these players to avoid confounding our analyses, but this also meant that we were not able to measure gender differences between the most advanced players. 
 
 Second, our analysis recognized that the rate of leveling up slows down as players progress. For example, it would take a lot more time and effort for a level 60 player to level up than a level 30 player. Therefore, our analysis compared apples to apples by evaluating players’ performance only against others who were at the same level. 
 
 Contrary to the stereotype, we found that player gender itself does not cause performance differences. Instead, the perception of women as poor gamers is fueled by other factors. For example, we found that women spent less time playing overall than men and chose more assistive character classes, such as Priests, who fare better healing group members than fighting on their own. When we took such factors into account by statistically controlling them in the analyses, the gender performance gap disappeared; women advanced at least as fast as men did in both games. 
 
 We also realized that different players are interested in different aspects of MMOs, and a few of those differences may correlate with gender. There’s some empirical evidence that men tend to focus more on achievement in video games – leveling up rapidly, gaining in-game status and competing against others – while women are drawn to social interactions, whether it’s helping other players or forming long-term relationships. 
 
 This suggests that men should advance faster than women. However, we found the opposite: Women advanced at least as fast as men did. So taking into account different play motivations (which we were unable to do in this study’s analysis) likely only strengthens our conclusions. 
 
 Beyond video games 
 
 The stereotype that women are inferior gamers is not only false, but could also make women more easily discouraged and less likely to play in the first place. Of course, this gender performance stereotype exists in a number of other contexts. In the software development community GitHub, for example, women are perceived as worse coders than men. 
 
 Our research has notable implications for this important social issue. Studies have shown that video games can be an important gateway to science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields. If stereotypes about girls and women are preventing them from playing, then it could potentially contribute to preexisting gender inequality and stereotyping in these fields. 
 
 One approach to dealing with this issue is to promote stereotype-free gaming experiences for women and girls through female-supportive gaming communities, such as the PMS Clan, one of the oldest and most renowned female-oriented gaming communities in the world. Scholars such as Gabriela Richard at Pennsylvania State University have found that members of these communities are more confident and perceive themselves as better gamers. 
 
 Game designers can also help. They have the ability to construct the games to make them less hostile and more welcoming to female players. For example, Riot Games established the Tribunal, a system that allows the player community to review reported bad behaviors from fellow players, and then vote on whether to punish the offender. Banned players also get a “reform card” with the details of the offense, as well as judgments from the Tribunal. So far, the Tribunal has significantly reduced online harassment. 
 
 While programs like Tribunal are a starting point in the larger battle to end gender stereotypes, our findings will hopefully allow female gamers to realize that, when it comes to inherent skill, they’re on a level playing field. ||||| ADVERTISEMENT 
 
 If Gamergate taught us one thing, it's that lurking behind gaming culture is a contingent of sexist players eager to find any excuse to harass women in the gaming industry. Unfortunately, sexist male gamers still claim that women cannot game as hard as they can, a fact that prompted one team of scientists to conduct perhaps the most thorough Gamergate smackdown in history by analyzing multiplayer online role-playing games. 
 
 The study took such confounding factors as playing time, character choice, and guild membership into consideration, and examined how quickly male and female players leveled up. Nonetheless, "Once you take into account all these confounding factors, the gender differences disappear," said coauthor Cuihua Shen of the University of California Davis, in a press statement. 
 
 "There is no gender difference." 
 
 Women now constitute nearly half of the gamer population in the United States, and more women are involved in designing video games than ever before. Sure, they play differently than male gamers — prior studies have shown that women prefer casual rather than highly competitive genres such as first person shooters — but there's no reason to believe, as Gamergate sexists do, that they're ruining gaming. And yet, "gaming communities as a whole are still very hostile toward women," Shen says. "The prevalent stereotype is that women are not as good… as men." 
 
 Scientists would love to disprove the ridiculous notion that men can sit on a couch and contort their fingers while screaming at a television screen better than women. But showing that women are just as good at gaming as men has proven difficult. Besides for one 2009 study, few researchers have managed to leverage meaningful data to answer this question — and, until now, nobody could figure out how to test whether women perform as well as men in real video games played outside of a laboratory. So Shen and her team asked two popular massively multiplayer online games — "EverQuest II" in North America and "Chevaliers' Romance III" in China — to send over their data. 
 
 First of all, they confirmed prior findings that men and women don't have the same goals in playing video games. Studies have shown that men enjoy competitive games while women prefer cooperative ones; that women are reluctant to self-identify as "gamers," while men appear to embrace the title; women are more likely to choose supportive character classes, such as Priests and Healers while men gravitate toward the Barbarians. 
 
 But the ultimate measure of a gamer isn't what class or guild he or she identifies with — it's his or her level in the game. After analyzing data from more than 9,000 "EverQuest II" players and 2,000 "Chevaliers' Romance III" players, the researchers found that players who registered as female reach lower levels, on average, than their male counterparts — but also played less often. When all factors, including guild membership and the amount of time playing the game were taken into account, women performed quite well. From the study: 
 
 "Taken together, these models show that women … advanced in the game at least as fast as men, and — in some cases — exceeded them…Perceived gender-based performance disparities seem to result from factors that are confounded with gender (i.e., amount of play), not player gender itself. The stereotype of female players as inferior is not only false, but it is also a potential cause for unequal participation in digital gaming." 
 
 Perhaps, then, it's time for us to stop telling little girls that they're terrible at video games. First of all, the science suggests it's not true. But more importantly, women who feel alienated from video game culture stand to lose out in the long term, because video games and their tech-savvy, nerdiness have become, "an important entry point for people into STEM-related careers," Shen says. Indeed, studies have shown that gamers are more likely to enter and succeed in science and technology-related fields than people who do not play video games. However trivial it may seem, getting more women into video games — and debunking the stereotype that they're inherently bad at "EverQuest" — could help fix the troubling minority of women in science and technology careers. 
 
 "We think the stereotype that women are worse players at games could contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy, that discourages their entry into science, technology, engineering and math fields," Shen says. "We might be able to break the stereotype and the self-fulfilling prophecy cycle." 
 
 This article originally appeared at Vocativ.com: Study: Female gamers are just as good as gamer bros
– The hostility toward women gamers that was laid bare in 2014 during the GamerGate controversy extends to the stereotype that female gamers are inferior to their male counterparts. So researchers at the University of California, Davis, decided to track thousands of players in two multiplayer online role-playing games and compare just how quickly the players advanced to higher levels. And as Cuihua “Cindy” Shen, an assistant professor of communication, reports in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, when controlling for factors such as time devoted to playing, character choice, and membership in a player's guild, "The gender differences disappear." In fact, she goes on to write for the Conversation, "Women advanced at least as fast as men did." Shen says the findings confirm certain differences in style of play, such as that men tend to focus on competing and gaining in-game status while women tend to play more socially and help others. But in terms of the bottom line: advancing to a higher level, the difference was nil among the 11,000 gamers they analyzed playing Everquest II and Chevalier's Romance III. Aside from one study in 2009, Vocativ reports that this is the first to figure out how to go about testing gender differences in gaming performance outside of a lab. Why does it matter? Nearly half the gaming population is now female, yet they are represented at even lower numbers in STEM fields of science, technology, engineering, and math. "The stereotype that women are worse players at games could contribute to a self-fulfilling prophecy," Shen says. (Guys who are hostile to girl gamers tend to be poor performers.)