Blog Task - Gender and Games

Blog Task - Gender and Games

I'm not sure if its obvious but there isnt as many women in the games industry as there are men. The women that do work in the industry tend to fill the roles of administration and marketing and occasionally managerial roles. A figure as low as 7% represent the female designers in the industry. When we take a look at the technical jobs like coding and engineering we see less still with barely 5% of women doing these jobs. 

We try to think of a reason why this is so and come to the conclusion that maybe women take jobs where they believe it is commonplace for a woman to work. As the industry is at the moment when we think of the stereotype for a coder we think geeky boy with thick rimmed glasses and a bad case of acne lol. Obviously we know this isn't the case and most people are not that biased towards stereotypes but we do know they play a small part in there.

The other thing we have to think about is the few women that do work in these jobs, instead of making it more women friendly are actually changing themselves to fit in and allowing the male dominance in the industry to thrive. What is needed is a surge in women technicians who can come in and make the workplace more diverse in the sex tense.

Another problem that could be deterring women from entering the industry is feeling of being less than equal, believing the fact that if push comes to shove and they are going for the same job as a man and equally skilled that the man would automatically be chosen in keeping with common practice and what seems like industry standard as the man could be pictured more easily doing the job than that of the woman. Maybe even worried about the thought of the employer if they were a key person in the production of a time pressure game release and they fell pregnant and would need to leave the project halfway through?

However we can see in the stats of gamers that now there is nearly just as many women as men playing games and wont be long before women want to come in with their own ideas and start putting their touch on the gaming industry.

As you can see above nearly as many girls as boys play games right trough the ages until 50+ where more women than men actually play :D