With female/other player-bases, moving towards a co-ed t1 ecosystem requires riot to address one prevailing issue:
There's significantly fewer female/other players attempting to go pro in valorant than men
(For the simplicity of statistics, I'll only refer to Men and Women for now)
If, out of an average of 100 players trying to go pro, 50 were men and 50 were women, then there would already be co-ed teams in tier 2 and tier 1, just from climbing up the ladder through conventional means. Assuming only 2 of those 100 people even manage to scratch the surface of pro-play, then on average 1 would be a guy and 1 would be a girl.
However, that is not the case, and if you imagine the real ratio of men to women trying to go pro, then it's not surprising to find out that men are overwhelmingly more likely to become pros as a result; i.e. out of those 100 players, assuming a 90/10 split, then that's a <1% chance of either of those two players who break into pro-play being women.
GC serves two purposes:
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To promote esports among the existing female/other playerbases by providing them a stable ecosystem to play for a living. Esports in general is not exactly the most stable career choice to begin with; many women among other marginalized genders are reluctant to pursue Esports because not only is there no precedent of someone like them making it to the top, but even among the top there's barely any financial stability. By making them salaried professionals, GC allows female/other players to have hope of being paid to play video games one day aside from VCT. As a result, this ends up producing more female/other players in general that attempt to grind through the ranks to achieve that, thereby increasing the amount of women/others trying to go pro, and in turn moving that magical ratio to the ideal 50/50 split of men to women aspiring to be pro players.
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Develop existing talent to artificially boost the chances of a female/other player making it into tier 2 or VCT; it acts as a safety net that provides female/other players with more chances to prove themselves in professional environments whereas in the conventional tier 3 ladder they may have screwed up their only chance (tier 2 open qualifiers) or been dropped by their team for bad performance and never given an chance to improve. It's not like they're mutually exclusive either, V1/SR is always playing in Tier 3 whenever possible, from Knights weeklies to NACL open qualifiers. They aren't "stuck" in GC or "not trying to get out of the kiddie pool"