Female avatars are worth less than male avatars

By Xeni Jardin at 10:47 am Monday, Jun 23

I spent the weekend devouring a draft of Brad King and John Borland's forthcoming book Dungeons and Dreamers, which charts the community history of gaming... profiles the individual quirky, wacky developers and super-fraggers, but unlike other books, weaves them together to sketch out a broad map of gaming's social DNA. Some interesting tales of women gamers and developers, too. Good stuff -- more on the book and the Dungeons and Dreamers blog later. But this morning, an item on Declan's list from Age and Sydney Morning Herald deputy IT editor Nathan Cochrane's blog:

US economist Edward Castronova has discovered that female avatars, from worlds such as EverQuest, trade online at an average 10 per cent discount to their price were they male-designated. Castronova theorises that the same forces at play in the real world that keep womens' earning power below that of their male counterparts -- even where they have identical skills -- are also at work online. Men, it seems, like to appoint in their real-world successors analogs of themselves. Online, that behaviour carries over into who they appoint as their virtual alter-ego, the avatar.

permalink to Nathan's blog post, link to Castronova's report "The Price of Man and Woman: A Hedonic Pricing Model of Avatar Attributes in a Synthetic World," Discuss.