MMOS are online worlds where thousands of players develop characters, make friends, join groups, complete quests and slay dragons togetherGENDER PLAYS NO ROLE Contrary to the stereotype, the researchers found player gender itself does not cause performance differences.Instead, the perception of women as poor gamers is fuelled by other factors. For example, they found women spent less time playing overall than men and chose more assistive character classes, such as Priests, who fare better healing group members than fighting on their own. When they took such factors into account by statistically controlling them in the analyses, the gender performance gap disappeared; women advanced at least as fast as men did in both games.They also realised different players are interested in different aspects of MMOs, and a few of those differences may correlate with gender. There's some empirical evidence that men tend to focus more on achievement in video games – levelling up rapidly, gaining in-game status and competing against others – while women are drawn to social interactions, whether it's helping other players or forming long-term relationships.This suggests that men should advance faster than women. However, we found the opposite: Women advanced at least as fast as men did. So taking into account different play motivations (which we were unable to do in this study's analysis) likely only strengthens our conclusions.Getting to the next levelOur research used anonymous server data from over 10,000 men and women in two MMOs, 'EverQuest II' in the United States and 'Chevaliers' Romance III' in China. 'We knew each player's actual gender through their account registration information.When players finish quests and kill monsters in MMOs, they earn experience points. 'When experience points reach a threshold, the player ascends to the next 'level,' which unlocks new abilities, skills and access to new content. As in most video games, levels indicate a player's progress.Naturally, players spending a lot of time in the game are likely to reach high levels. That is why the speed of leveling up, rather than the level itself, measures performance in our study.Before getting to our findings, we want to point out a couple of things we took into consideration. First, players who had reached the top level in the games were excluded in our analyses.