I am a huge League Esports fan. I love watching the best of the best battle it out for fame and glory on the Rift. But I am noticing a lack of girls on the big name teams. Frankly there is a huge lack of representation. Is it because there aren't any high tier ranked female players? I don't particularly care that they aren't there. The teams are designed to be their best, and I will trust their judgement. But I am curios as to why no one has a woman on their team.
Put simply, there's a lack of representation because the talent pool of top-tier female players is either non-existent or not interested in going pro. There was one in the LCS who went pro briefly (Remilia), but she stepped down for personal reasons.
Ultimately, women can go pro, but it needs to be on the basis of skill and not gender. A team picking up an A-list male player over a B-list female player isn't sexism, it's trying to find the best possible players to create the best possible team. This is ultimately why Siren back in 2013 didn't work (that, and some of the members were just horrendously toxic, even towards their team members).
Is it because there aren't any high tier ranked female players?
Pretty much. There's several theories and it probably has more than one reason, but ultimately that's the case. The majority of top players are male.
Probably because none are good enough. No team is going to play Yahoo CEO and hire chicks because vagina. Esports teams only make money with results. If there were women who got them, they'd be playing.
The answer is pretty simple: Lack there of female players at the highest points of the ladder.
Keep in mind that (as far as I remember) the male-to-female ratio players in league is like nine to one. Then consider that the Challenger portion of the ladder is like the 0.02% of the total player base, and simply by odds, it's gonna be REALLY HARD to find a girl playing at the highest level of the ladder.
There's stories of male super stars of Solo Queue brought to LCS/Challenger teams who choke just because how hard and different it is to play at that level.
So... when you put everything together, you'll see the odds for a girl to pop-up in a pro team are really slim. Remilia stepped down from Renegades for personal reasons and because she wanted the team to succeed and actually felt they would do better with another support. Then there's Yoonie (at the top of my head) and she's currently Diamond 4, but D4 is nowhere near the level you need to play on the pro level.
So, as many have pointed out, it's not a matter of sexism, but simply teams looking for the best players they can find. If suddenly there was this AMAZING gal playing... dunno, Top. And she had a respectable champion pool and was in the Top 10 in the Challenger ladder, I'm sure someone would probably pick her up. One of Remilia's problems was her champion pool was really shallow. Like... "Thresh and Morgana only" shallow.
So, could it happen? For sure. But the odds of it happening are SUPER slim, at least for now, simply because of how the population of the game is.
They want to win, they take the best players available at the top of the regions.
There's just not that many females that high up and the few that are there can't just be slotted in, players are chosen based on a teams needs.
Choosing females for the sake of it is probably a quick way to lose
