Events like The International, the Fortnite World Cup, and the League of Legends World Championships prove that there’s an awful lot of money to be made in esports. According to a recent study from online marketplace OnBuy.com, however, female players are missing out on the vast majority of those prize pools.
According to that report, which uses data from EsportsEarnings, not one woman appears in the list of the 300 highest-earning esports players. Starcraft II player Sasha ‘Scarlett’ Hostyn,, whose total earnings amount to more than $330,000, only comes in at number 329. The second highest earner, Halo: Reach’s Katherine ‘Mystik’ Gunn, doesn’t even make the top 500 with her career earnings of $122,000.
To put that in perspective, the highest-earning male player – Dota 2’s Johan Sundstein – has two International wins under his belt, driving his winnings to nearly $7 million. That is, admittedly, the result of two big wins, but it’s indicative of the gulf that exists between the male and female esports scenes.
In fact, the gulf is so significant that it’s more than 20 times Scarlett’s career earnings.
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OnBuy also calculated that if you add together the tournament earnings of the top 400 female players, it only reaches to $3.03 million – less than half of Sundstein’s earnings.
The rest of the top ten list features Street Fighter V player Ricki Ortiz, Dead or Alive 4’s Kasumi Chan and Sarah Lou, four CS:GO players, and one Fortnite player.