Hearthstone Tournament not for Women

In a rather absurd turn of events, the ieSF has decided that women are not allowed to compete along their male counterparts in games such as Hearthstone. The ieSF, or ‘international eSports Federation’ is an organisation based in South Korea comprised of other smaller eSports companies around the world. Their aim is to promote eSports as a “true sport”.

To do this, they have decided that male and female players should not be able to play and compete together, because this is the way it is in physical sports. It is an stance that other eSports organisations seems to be taking and one that does not make much sense, as the reason for dividing the genders within physical sports does not apply to electronic ones.

“The decision to divide male and female competitions was made in accordance with international sports authorities, as part of our effort to promote e-Sports as a legitimate sports.”

News of this comes after a Finnish Hearthstone tournament stated it was “open only to Finnish male players.” It seems that dividing the genders isn’t enough for ieSF as they have begun only hosting certain game tournaments for certain genders.

As summed up in the Facebook picture, women are not able to enter the Hearthstone, Dota 2 or Ultra Street Fighter IV competitions while men won’t be able to enter in the Tekken Tag Tournament 2 competition either, although with four tournaments for males and two for females the scales are clearly not balanced. But even the competition shared by the genders, Starcraft II, the players will only be competing against those of the same gender.