There's an interesting article over at the NewScientist website about sexual inequality in Everquest. As happened before with some studies on the economics of EQ, Edward Castronova, an economist at California State University at Fullerton, studied the value of characters sold on eBay. There seems to be a large discrepancy between the average prices of male avatars in comparison with female chars. According to Castronova this mirrors the real-world sexual discrimination. Jason Rutter, a computer games researcher at Manchester University, UK, has yet another explanation for this:

In EverQuest, as well as other games, people respond to you differently based on your sex," Rutter told New Scientist. "There's a growing literature about how female gamers adopt male characters to stop getting hassled."