“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. 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. There’s also the long-held stereotype that men are simply better gamers than women. 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. “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. 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 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. 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. 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. Contrary to the stereotype, we found that player gender itself does not cause performance differences. 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. This suggests that men should advance faster than women. 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. 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. “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.
– 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.)