00:00The Girl Gamer eSports Festival will be holding the World Finals of the event in Dubai at
00:06Maidan 1 this December.
00:08It's important to promote all the gender balance that is happening in the region, we
00:12see so many powerful women, later in the elections it's also going to be raised to 50% of women
00:18representation in the parliament, so it's incredible and we believe that this needs
00:22to be put out there.
00:23Girl Gamer eSports strives to provide a comfortable and safe space for women to grow their gaming
00:28skills and have fun doing it.
00:29We think that there's a lot of barriers that women need to go over in order to even start
00:35competing at the same level and this involves online discrimination, online bullying, so
00:42they have to overcome all these barriers just to start playing at a competitive level and
00:47then sometimes even when they are very competitive and master level on their game, they're still
00:52not admitted into one of these professional teams because they're mostly male dominated
00:57teams right now and the team owners are concerned of inserting a girl into an environment full
01:03of other guys, for other guys, that will create instability in the team's communication and
01:07all of that, so basically even if they play really well they are still discriminated solely
01:11based on their gender.
01:13Paul Roy, CEO of local gaming organization Galaxy Race eSports, is optimistic that the
01:18talent pool in this region will greatly benefit from this event.
01:21Women account for about a third of all gamers globally and they account for about 40% of
01:25all eSports viewing, but in terms of professional eSports representation, less than 0.1%.
01:31They had a Fortnite tournament in the US and in fact there's an article that came out that
01:36not one of the top 100 players was a woman, not because, and the thing is eSports is probably
01:41the only sport on the planet where women have, I mean men don't have any distinctive advantage
01:47over a woman, there's no physical advantage, no mental advantage, so you'll find a lot
01:53of cases when women actually go out and beat the men.
01:56So what they've done very well is to give a spotlight on the platform to women itself
02:00and there will come a point when you'll start seeing more and more all-inclusive teams and
02:05women competing against men.
02:06It's already started, there are a few professional organizations in the US that have started
02:09to bring in female players onto their roster, it'll change, it'll change very quickly.
02:14The industry is so young itself so it's going to take a little bit of time, but it's happening.
02:18Attracting the Mega Gaming event is part of Government of Dubai Media Office's strategy
02:22to drive the development of the industry in the region.
02:24Logan Fish for Golf News.
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