--- title: Men Who Attack Women Online Are Losers: Study description: Men who perform badly in games are more likely to harass female users canonical: https://time.com/3965630/men-attack-women-online-losers/ author: Maya Rhodan article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2015-07-21T12:09:39.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-05T08:29:18.117Z article:section: Science og:title: Men Who Attack Women Online Are Losers: Study og:description: Men who perform badly in games are more likely to harass female users og:url: https://time.com/3965630/men-attack-women-online-losers/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt96a756cee8ae33e5/69885bb0f887dc7ee6e9172e/gamer.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 5800 og:image:height: 3263 og:image:alt: Teenager playing video games og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Men Who Attack Women Online Are Losers: Study twitter:description: Men who perform badly in games are more likely to harass female users twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt96a756cee8ae33e5/69885bb0f887dc7ee6e9172e/gamer.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Study Finds That Men Who Attack Women Online Are, Literally, Losers > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=421a24b1-f806-42fe-84f9-c17db1c7ba79&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: What to Know About Kids and Video Games [Watch (HLS stream): What to Know About Kids and Video Games](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/kFoAbgU1.m3u8) (1:44)  _Published 2015-07-07. Women in Video Games-v1_ by [Maya Rhodan](https://time.com/author/maya-rhodan/) ## Maya Rhodan Jul 21, 2015 12:09 PM UTC It’s a hashtag war between some gamers and critics that has been raging for months, and has now spilled over into the real world. by [Maya Rhodan](https://time.com/author/maya-rhodan/) ## Maya Rhodan Jul 21, 2015 12:09 PM UTC A new study purports to show what we all could have guessed: Men who attack women online are [actual losers](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613). A pair of researchers examined interactions between players during 163 games of Halo 3 to determine when men were most likely to exhibit sexist, anti-social behavior toward their female peers. According to the study, which was recently published in the journal [PLOS One](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0131613), men who were worse players than their peers tended to hurl more nastiness at female gamers. On the other hand, men who knew their way around the console were nicer to male and female players. The researchers say the findings support an “evolutionary argument” that low-status men with low dominance have more to lose and are therefore more hostile to women who threaten their status in the social hierarchy. “As men often rely on aggression to maintain their dominant social status, the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to disregard a female’s performance and suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social rank,” researchers write. The findings also support the growing body of anecdotal and research-based evidence that women face harsh blowback when they enter into and thrive in male-dominated corners of the Internet. As the Washington _Post_[ points out](http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2015/07/20/men-who-harass-women-online-are-quite-literally-losers-new-study-finds/?tid=pm%5Fpop%5Fb), however, the study does not offer any solutions on how to solve the issue. ## Transcript This is Rosalind Wiseman, and for the last four years I've been studying video games' influence on youth culture. Pretty quickly I realized Realize that the gaming industry publishers had an assumptions about young people's' opinions that were really different than what I was hearing from young people. So, in 2014, in collaboration with my colleagues Charlie Kuhn and gaming expert Ashley Burch, we surveyed over 1, 400 middle and high school students throughout the country. And here is some of our finders. In Game of War Kate Upton plays like Athena and she's barely wearing any clothes. This game is played by kids? Kids. And I don't know any kids who want to see that. This game, and it's called Mortal Kombat, and I really like it. But I notice that a lot of the female characters are wearing very scantily clad clothing. I just thought that it's kind of polluting young kids' brains to think that this is how they should dress. 47 % of middle school boys agreed and 61 % of high school boys agreed that female characters are treated too often as sex objects in games, and a widely held assumption in the industry, is that boys only want to play male characters. It's one of the reasons the gaming industry says that they're reluctant to develop more strong female characters. What we found out was that 70 % of girls and 78 % of boys said it doesn't matter what gender the character they play is. Interestingly, boys care less about playing a male character as they age, and cares care More about playing a female one. I know this may seem insignificant because this is games we're talking about, but it does matter because it's an important part of our culture that is sending hypersexualized depictions of women onto the phone, computer and TV screens of millions of boys and girls. Our kids deserve better, and it's what they want. 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