Becky Esteness was fed up. She was at a local wargaming convention, where enthusiasts schlep their pewter armies to beige conference halls for a long

Why Are There So Few Women in Wargaming?

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2021-06-05 17:00:08

Becky Esteness was fed up. She was at a local wargaming convention, where enthusiasts schlep their pewter armies to beige conference halls for a long, meditative weekend of stone cold tactics, and Esteness couldn't wait to get her orders out. She's been a hobbyist wargamer for decades. In fact, she runs a company with her husband that ships boxes full of miniatures to eager customers all over the world.

Esteness specializes in the historical sets; no orcs, or elves, or dark magic, just a small cadre of frilly line infantry mirroring the feints and stratagems of vintage Napoleonic campaigns. But despite all of her obvious bona fides, Esteness is a woman, and none of the men at the convention could quite believe what they were seeing when she turned up with her battalions.

Many of her fellow competitors persistently assumed she was a girlfriend, or a wife, or a daughter of one of the other tabletop generals—dragged along to the battlefront against her wishes. Eventually, Esteness grew tired of correcting them, so she allowed the men to believe their biases.