There's no gender performance gap in online gaming

The stereotype that men make better gamers than women is very much real for some. But a new study lead by a researcher in the University of California shows that gender performance in online video games don't really differ at all.

Cuihua "Cindy" Shen, an assistant professor of communication, tracked both men and women in massive online role playing games and how quickly they progressed from one level to the next. And she found that when accounting for differences in playing time, membership in guild and player choices, women advance at least as quickly as their male counterparts.

"Once you take into account all these confounding factors, the gender differences disappear. There is no gender difference," Shen said.

Shen and her colleagues have analysed data from more than 9000 Everquest II players and 2000 players of the chinese game Chevaliers' Romance III. Interestingly, this apparently marks the first time that a study of this kind has looked at two different games from two different national cultures.