The Time for Women in Games

VeeCee writes "Next Generation has an interesting article on why few women are game developers, why it should change, and how." From the article: "Fulton then cited workforce statistics, showing that in 1950, 30 percent of women worked, compared with 70 percent six years ago. 'We're rapidly becoming equal players in the larger workforce. More women are playing games.' Citing a study that showed women outnumbered men as players in the 24 to 35 year-old demographic, Fulton granted that casual games were a factor. 'However I think there's an appetite there. As we get online, as the games start getting more interactive, more social, women are getting more and more interested in what it means to play games.'"

Comments

Brenda Laurel, bring back Purple Moon!

[spun]

The time is finally right for a female-centric game company. Don't know who Brenda Laurel is? You should. The woman is a freakin' genius and a pioneer in the field of human-computer interaction.

Re:Girls aren't interested in programming

[stanwirth]

The little light-bulb went on for a friend of mine when his sister with a Ph.D in computational physics was hired by a high-end as "a fukin' booth-babe! A Demo Dame! What kinda sh** is that?!" as he'd say with considerable outrage in his voice. And quite right too -- when you help put your sister through the best schools, she gets the degrees and demonstrates the prowess and formulates important (physics/math) problems and writes the code and brings in the grants and gets the postdocs and --- then the best job she can get is basically not much better than a conventioneer's whore -- not only do you start to wonder why the hell you and she bothered, but your family is humiliated and if she doesn't like being a booth babe, she can bloody well quit and go on welfare. If she has kids, she'll be outright fired and wind up on welfare. with a PhD.

That's what it was like 15-20 years ago. Which is why you just don't see any ongoing culture of technical women aged 35-65, and certainly few mentors beyond a few managers who specialize in managing not code-writing, these days. It's why the percentage of women in many fields actually declined despite tons of programs to promote their participation -- they knew how they'd be treated in an all-male environment: like a mother to be fired, or a whore to be used and then fired. Better off going to nursing school.

True equality requires complete equality

[Distinguished Hero]

I wonder why we never hear people complaing that women are not 50% of the criminal "workforce".

From the UK: "Men outnumber women in all major crime categories. Between 85 and 95 per cent of offenders found guilty of burglary, robbery, drug offences, criminal damage or violence against the person are male. Although the number of offenders are relatively small, 98 per cent of people found guilty of, or cautioned for, sexual offences are male"

Or how about garbagemen (garbagepeople) or coal miners? Why are people never concerned about women not making headways there?

Riddle me that, Batman.

Re:True equality requires complete equality

[onkelonkel]

As an interesting exercise, let us substitute $men for $women and $female_dominated_profession for $male_dominated profession. Example: nursing for engineering, and lets see how the rhetoric sounds.

"It is self-evident that the low number of men in nursing is the result of systematic discrimination against men by the sexist women who dominate the profession. Without affirmative action, the entrenched and dominant female hierarchy will never allow men to compete as equals. Hospitals should stop hiring female nurses until the number of men and women working in the profession are the same."

Does that sound odd to you?

Re:What's your point?

[Distinguished Hero]

My one question is this: why is it always an assumed premise that if there's a statistic in which girls or boys are over-represented:
1. it's automatially a bad thing
2. it's automatically a bad thing for girls


Not true. Nobody seems to be concerned that men outnumber women in suicides (in developed countries, with the exception of Chine -- if you count them as developed), or that men outnumber women as drug users, or that most of the people in jail are men, or that most garbagemen (garbagepeople, sorry) are men, or that most coal miners (or any other crap job) are men. If only there was some sort of conclusion we could draw from all of this...

I know a lot of female gamers...

[kria]

I know a lot of female gamers, but maybe that's because I am one. Programmer, too. But I'm a slight anomoly - most of the women gamers I know are tabletop gamers, while I play both, in nearly even amounts. So for players, I can buy the viewpoint that far too many games drive away women with big boobs and scanty costumes. Female armor in most MMORPGs, for example, tends to get a lot of jokes, just like really bad fantasy novel covers.

Regarding women as programmers, I think that there are two things to consider:
a) programmers are geeky and particularly at the moment, teenagers frown on people being smart, as the opposite of cool. Women tend to be more socially aware (or socially malleable) than their male counterparts in high school, so while they may quietly get good grades, they probably won't choose a geeky path like CS in college.

b) there are still, believe it or not, teachers who discourage women from fields related to math or science. I was lucky enough not to have that problem in high school (now a fading ten years in the past), but I have heard plenty of first hand stories on the subject.