Why Are There No Women in Professional LoL?

League of Legend’s professional scene is an extraordinarily large one with new faces showing up all the time. However, if you’ve been around the scene for a while, you might have noticed that there are absolutely zero women who play League professionally. Have you ever wondered why this is?

There are several reasons for there not being any women in professional LoL. Those reasons range from the entire e sports scene being primarily dominated by men leading to there being several gender stereotypes, as well as the fact that there’s little to no good female representation on the scene. Finally, cultural barriers also factor into all of this.

We’ll be going through three of the biggest reasons there aren’t any women in professional League of Legends.

Reason #1: Gender Stereotypes

The fact of the matter is that the professional League of Legends scene is primarily dominated by men. The professional players are mostly men, the higher ups of the scene are mostly men, and a huge chunk of the audience also consists of mostly men.

Because of this, there are several gender stereotypes surrounding the community. These stereotypes range from women only being able to play support champions well, to the job of being a professional gamer being a “man’s job” instead of being done by a woman.

Because of these gender stereotypes discouraging women from pursuing careers in professional gaming, many women instead opt to be streamers or create content using some other website or medium. This way, although they aren’t able to become actual professionals, they’re still able to showcase their immense skill to their viewers.

However, the women players who DO try to pursue a career in professional League of Legends often aren’t given the same opportunities to grow as men are. Other times, they aren’t even accepted on teams, despite having considerable skill in the game.

Perhaps the reason so many professional women only teams are so disliked, in addition to the gender stereotypes point we mentioned, is because so many of these teams claim to be playing because they want to prove that women can be just as good, if not better than men in League of Legends. Although we don’t doubt that there are certainly some women that are VERY skilled at the game, maybe antagonizing a majority of the player base isn’t a good idea if you want to make it big as a professional player.

Reason #2: Lack of Representation

The second reason you don’t see too many women in professional League of Legends is because there’s literally zero female representation in the scene. Individuals tend to follow in the footsteps of people they admire or look up to, but when it comes to female League of Legends professional players, there’s no one for women wanting to be professionals to look up to.

That isn’t to say there aren’t any female professional LoL teams at all, however. Far from it, actually. There have been several women only professional LoL teams, but their track record really hasn’t been all that good, especially when it comes to those that actually participated in the LCL or LCS. Out of these teams, there are two we would like to specifically highlight here.

The first is a Hong Kong women only team called Panda Cute. Although they claim to be a professional women only LoL team, they’ve only ever really gone up against other random women only teams instead of facing the actual professional players and taking part in actual professional tournaments to prove they really are as skilled as they claim to be.

The second example, and probably the biggest reason so many women are scared of joining the professional LoL scene, is a female only team that Vaevictis eSports put together a while back. Although these women professional players did indeed go up against other professionals in the LCL, a tournament organized by Riot Games, they lost. Badly. As a matter of fact, they hold the record for the fastest defeat in the LCL, which is embarrassing, to say the least.

Reason #3: Cultural Barriers 

With millions of players logging in every single month to play League of Legends, it’s a no brainer that these players come from all over the world. Unfortunately, there are some places in the world where a woman pursuing a career in professional gaming is unheard of or extremely frowned upon.

These social expectations and norms might be the reason so many women who are incredibly skilled League of Legends players are not able to become professionals in the scene. As we mentioned above, many individuals are still of the backward mentality that gaming is a man’s hobby.

Additionally, there’s also the fact that the professional scene doesn’t cater to every single language or nationality in the world. Aside from some languages like English and Chinese, there aren’t too many languages that are supported when it comes to official LoL tournaments by Riot Games.