Female Avatars
© Thinkstock
It may seem like men are always willing to lend an attractive women a hand, and a new study has found this bias extends into virtual worlds.

Published in the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media, the new study looked at how men and women interact with each other in an online game. Researchers saw that women were offered less help in the game when they selected an unattractive female avatar, as opposed to an attractive female or male virtual representative.

"It doesn't matter if you have an ugly avatar or not, if you're a man, you'll still receive about the same amount of help," said study author Franklin Waddell, a doctoral candidate in mass communications at Penn State. "However, if you are a woman and operate an unattractive avatar, you will receive significantly less help."

Waddell said the study's result with respect to virtual attractiveness mirrors what other studies found in the real world.

"Overall, many of the same gender and sexual stereotypes seem to permeate the online worlds," Waddell said. "The study supports the idea that our responses to stereotypes and norms follow us from real life into virtual environments."

Lose-lose for women in online settings

Interestingly, the new study also found that men were less likely to help women who chose a male avatar as opposed to an attractive female.

"Although woman are typically less penalized for engaging in cross-sex behavior than men in offline settings, we found an opposite pattern in the online setting, such that men were allowed to control either a male or female avatar without penalty, whereas women were penalized for controlling an opposite-sex avatar," Waddell said. "In other words, when the stereotype would typically benefit women, the pattern was flipped in the virtual world, allowing men to engage in 'gender bending' with their avatar, whereas women were not encouraged to."

"So it truly is a lose-lose for women in online settings, according to our study," Waddell said.

To reach their conclusion, researchers used different avatars in the online game World of Warcraft to study reactions to help requests of 2,300 individual players. The six avatars chosen for the study, three male and three female, had been ranked as having low, medium or high attractiveness by study participants.
WoW Avatars
© World of Warcraft/Blizzard EntertainmentThis image shows three levels of attractiveness in avatars from World of Warcraft.
During the gaming session, a researcher would ask a player for either a small favor, provide directions to a location, or a large favor, to actually guide the researcher to that location. Sex of the player was determined by clues offered by their avatar.

Waddell said the findings indicate that businesses should restrict online avatar options for workers interacting with colleagues or customers.

"Businesses often want to provide employees and customers with as many technological options as possible," Waddell said. "However, if business people are going to use avatars to interact with each other or with customers, they may want to use avatars that are gender neutral, for example, or they risk bringing all of those stereotypes from the real world into their online environments."