• by Danielle Oster , December 24, 2025

Gaming has long been presented as a hobby dominated by men, despite video games’ increasing popularity with people of all genders. Even as an awareness of women in gaming has grown, stereotypes of women gamers as “unserious,” “casual,” or only interested in “cozy” mobile games have persisted, supported by a masculine gatekeeping culture among certain gaming communities.

A new report on women in gaming suggests just how flawed these dated stereotypes are, setting out to put such myths to rest, while exploring how their gaming habits do differ from men.

Ad effectiveness analysis firm MarketCast released a new ““Myth-Busting Women Gamers” report, based on an online survey of 1,679 women and girls aged 13 and up, and 397 men aged 18 and up. MarketCast Vice President, Head of Gaming Chris Tee explained that comparisons between men and women only used responses from gamers 18 and older, with data for girl respondents under 18 used for “additional context.”

One comment from a 15-year-old girl from Illinois published in the report, for example, reads, “Many assume girls play slow-paced games. Wrong! They are also competitive gamers who won trophies along with men, changing the gaming community for good.”

And women gamers actually spend more time gaming per week, on average (19.8 hours), than men (18.9 hours). While they’re slightly more likely to be “casual” gamers who spend 10 hours per week or less on gaming (22% to 20%), they’re also slightly more likely to be “hardcore” gamers who spend 20 hours or more gaming per week (43% to 41%).  Sixty-four percent of women gamers aged 18-34 in the survey also said they were willing to pay for in-game purchases with real money, compared to 69% of men.

Another myth tackled by the report is the idea that women only want to play “cozy” games on mobile devices and shy away from faster-paced titles like first-person shooters.

According to the report, roughly half of women and girls surveyed preferred “cozy games,” and roughly half preferred “fast-paced games,” with the percentage who preferred “fast-paced games” growing to 55% among those who play games across multiple devices. Comparatively, 79% of men in the survey preferred “fast-paced games,” with only 21% responding that they preferred “cozy games.” Another way to look at those results, as the report points out, is that women represent a more diverse range of gaming habits than men.

The report also explores other ways in which women gamers, on average, have different gaming habits than men. Eighty-one percent  of women aged 18-34 in the survey said that spending time with others while gaming was more important to them than winning, for example, compared to 73% of men. One way to appeal to women gamers appears to be customization: 88% of women in the survey agreed that customization increased their desire to buy or play a game more.

“Women aren’t just participating in gaming; they are shaping its future by driving demand for deeper customization, stronger communities, and more intuitive devices,” the report concludes. “For developers, publishers, and marketers, the opportunity isn’t merely to acknowledge women in these spaces, but to design with them at the center.”

MarketCast has plans to expand on the findings of the report. Tee told Marketing Daily that a future iteration of the report will explore generational differences, both among and between women and men.