The Rise in Female Twitch Streamers

Twitch is the largest video game streaming site on the internet, with 140 million unique viewers a month. Similar to Youtube, those who get popular on Twitch can often become famous online personalities, making streaming and playing video games their entire career.

In a medium dominated by often sexist white men, this makes gaining popularity particularly hard for women/queer folks/people of color to gain popularly in the streaming world. Luckily, this is quickly changing, with female streamers becoming increasingly more popular, even surpassing their male counterparts in views.

Even so, sexism in the community is still pervasive, with top streamer Ninja saying that we won't stream with women due to the potential harassment/backlash it could cause. His decision, according to him, is due to the toxic nature of the twitch community, but this raises some important questions. First off, why, instead of deciding to never stream with women, doesn't he try to change the narrative and work toward making the twitch community less sexist and exclusive? Secondly, why is nobody in the community doing anything about this? Women streamers are gaining more and more popularity, yet are still experiencing sexism from their peers.

The top ten most famous streamers in the US have one thing in common, however, they are all white, heterosexual, and conventionally attractive. This excludes black gamers, queer gamers, and anyone else who does not look or identify a specific way. While the twitch community is making strides towards accepting women gamers (who make up about 45% of gamers)- they still have a very, very long way to go in order to be representative and accepting of all identities.