About half of gamers are women, but professional e-sports are still catching up.

From American public media, this is Marketplace Tech, I'm Megan McCarty-Karino.

Professional video gaming, known as e-sports, has grown into a billion dollar industry

in recent years. Tournament's draw crowds of tens of thousands to watch players compete

at games like Valorant and League of Legends, while top e-sports athletes earn millions of dollars.

But for too long, like so many facets of the gaming world, this industry has been dominated by men.

A 2019 report showed just 5% of professional e-sports players were women.

It's a reality that is slowly changing, as Marketplace Tech's Daniel Shin reports.

Heather Garoza watched her brother and his friends play competitive e-sports tournaments in the mid-2000s.

And me being the competitor I was, I didn't want my brother to be better than me at anything,

so I jumped into playing as well.

And that was the start of her long career as an e-sports athlete under her gamer ID Sapphire.

Back in the early days, Garoza remembered how unique it was to be a woman competing in live e-sports

tournaments. I didn't have to tell people what I looked like when I was going to meet someone at

an event because look for the woman and then you're going to find me. Today, there are still

few women competing at these attorneys, especially at the top level, says Morgan Remind,

co-director of the nonprofit research and advocacy group, any key.

For today, we see very few women on the big event stages, which is actually a pretty big

difference between the people in the stages and competing in those big prize pool tournaments,

and the number of women who are actually playing online at home.

Remind estimates at least 30% of gamers are women or girls, who potentially deal with

cultural misperceptions over their abilities and their skills, which can lead to a lot of

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