PURPOSE The popularity of esports – broadly defined as organised, competitive gaming – has grown exponentially. Professional esports athletes (e’athletes) compete internationally for multi-million-dollar prize pools in structured leagues and tournaments. Much like sports, esport teams are fully equipped with coaching staff and health practitioners. While esport tournaments have always been unisex, female e’athletes are yet to compete at an international level, although 45% of all gamers are female. To improve visibility, women-only tournaments were introduced, which have led to the first female e’athletes being drafted for upcoming international, unisex leagues. Concurrently, in response to mounting needs for player sustainability and wellbeing, esport research has prioritised translatable health and performance research for use by esport health practitioners. As the inclusion and visibility of females at professional levels continues to grow, esports health research will need to echo this shift to meet the health and performance needs of female e’athletes. Therefore, inform future research priorities, this study will characterise the proportion of females among esports health and performance research to describe what is currently known about the health, physiology, and performance of female e’athletes.

 

METHODS A scoping review was conducted to describe esports research undertaken on female e’athletes. Databases were searched in August 2023. Studies with an outcome related to e’athlete health, physiology, or performance were considered. Of 4675 studies, 95 were eligible. Sex/gender, study outcomes, sex-aggregated results, esports-specific demography, and reasons for female exclusion were extracted. Preliminary, descriptive results are presented.

 

RESULTS Of 7786 participants from 50 publications, 7% (n=510) are female. Two studies (n=42) (one investigating psychological coping, the other an exercise intervention for performance) aggregated data by sex, while 12 (n=468) presented only partial results by sex (including psychological profiling, injury status, BMI, social support, and body image). Of studies that included no females (n=8/25,) only 32% provided justification as to why. Results for physiological data with known sex-differences, such as heart rate variability, brain structure/function, body composition, and hormone responses, are only presented for males.

 

CONCLUSION Reflective of industry, female e’athletes are vastly underrepresented by esports health research. As such, sex-specific guidance for health management and performance of female e’athletes is yet to exist. Future work should collaborate with women’s health and female athlete experts for the generation of translatable and practical guidance for female e’athlete management. Additionally, owing to its impact on virtually all health and physiological outcomes reported in esports literature, menstrual cycle research in female e’athletes is warranted.