I used to follow a lot of gaming/nerd sites from back in the day when they catered to gamers/nerds and then started blocking them once they became corporate shills but I still get some articles in my feed and one of the gaming related articles threw out the "women make up half of all gamers" stat. I have no idea how in the world they came up with this stat, but if anyone who has been into gaming for a while would know there is something off about that. I've heard that they count someone playing candy crush or someone like my grandmother playing solitaire on their computer.

Now I get some games can appeal to more women than men. One of my guilty pleasures is the Sims and I've read that has a 60/40 women to men ratio which I can believe (of course the article was celebrating that point), but certain kinds of games like action, FPS, rpg, and sports would probably skew more male I would guess. Reminds me of how they try to push the 50/50 stat with comic books and they seem to include people who at the height of the MCU would claim to be comic book fans because they saw an Avengers movie.

Of course there are women who are into gaming, but the actual female gamers get little attention since they want to play games and not whine about the patriarchy. This whole thing does remind me of something someone posted on this site before. He said that if you want to know if a hobby is male dominated, just look at all the articles calling it "toxic". Take literature for example. I am a huge reader but I would say that women tend to be more hardcore readers than men, but something like Sci-fi is a genre that appeals to guys so we get endless lectures about females in Sci-Fi. Sci-Fi/Fantasy is my favorite genre to read but another genre I like is crime drama/murder mystery and since there are quite a few female authors I've never seen anyone complain about that. So I guess that is a good rule of thumb.

Sorry for the long post, but I am so sick of that stat!