Gender And Games

As a girl at a Games Design Course, I can tell you first hand that the feminine presence in the course is about 10 / 1.I have also had a brief experience in the industry, working as a QA Tester, at Electronic Arts and I could say that I was one of the 10 women testing in the "PC and Consoles" department, on a floor with about 100 something testers. So yes... the ration is kinda the same.

I believe that this huge difference comes from the fact that men are usually viewed as gamers, and until about 15 - 20 years ago, girls were only associated with tea parties, Barbies and pretty, pink shtuff. As you can see in the chart above, the more the fields glide towards the technical path, the lower the percentage of women in the industry is. Most would say that it's because women are better at taking care of the not so technical/math/sciency part of game making but of the more human/pay-check/interview/advertising part.

 And I agree that most of this is true. When you look at a polytechnics high school/college/university the ratio of men per woman is the same. And since game making is viewed as 70%-80% programing, of course the majority in that field are men. You could argue that women can go on the artsy part of game making, but even there the percentage is very low. And I wouldn't say that's because women are not good at art, but working in an mainly male environment can be quite challenging, and most women would rather be with their own kind. That's why you will find most of them in the HR department.

A second reason for this lack of equal numbers in the industry would be the fact that, until recently games weren't very girl friendly. And I'm not referring to Barbie games or dress-up games, but mostly, at the beginning of the development of the game industry, both girls and women couldn't picture themselves playing "Doom" or "Duke Nukem" or "Warcraft" or "Starcraft", and neither could society. They were for boys.

But this situation of inequality is mostly present in this industry. In most work places both men and women are in fairly equal numbers, from fashion designing to business and marketing. 

I am not writing this post to be on any of the two parts side. I have had the great luck of having parents you are open to games and with whom I played all the above mentioned games that were considered back in the day to be for boys. I worked in the industry, and now I'm studying at a course which prepares me to work again on the other side of the task sheet. The atmosphere is the same and it takes a special kind of view to manage to hold your own once you get there.

It's all a matter of perspective.