The Underrepresentation of Women in Esports Leadership Positions: Exploring the Barriers and Facilitating Factors

A qualitative approach comprising semi-structured interviews was used to investigate the underrepresentation of women in esports leadership positions. Purposive sampling (Smith & Sparkes, 2016) was initially used to reach potential interview participants. The research was disseminated in English through esports institutions (e.g., Women in Esports), events (e.g., Esports Insider), professional esports research and practitioner networks (e.g., Esports Research Network), job finding platforms (e.g., Hivefolio) and organisations based within the researchers’ existing networks. This process yielded seven participants. Subsequently, snowball sampling was used; interviewees referred to other women in esports leadership positions. The final sample included 16 female interviewees. Informed by the esports landscape identified by Wong and Meng-Lewis (2023), the interview sample provides broad coverage of women leaders within the multiple sectors of the esports industry. Data was collected between March 2024 and August 2024. All interviews were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim. Participant were anonymised and pseudonyms were allocated to protect the identity of the interviewees. Recruitment of interviewees stopped when data saturation, the moment at which no new themes emerged (Fugard and Potts 2015), was reached. Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases of thematic analyses were used to analyse the data. NVivo was used during the qualitative coding process. The interview transcripts cannot be shared publicly as the transcripts contain information that may allow identification of participants and contain confidential organisational and personal information which participants did not give their consent to share.