AJ and Dix take a look at the state of women working in the game industry.
Dix: So as regular Tappers have probably surmised, I’m a comic book fan in my free time, and so I tend to get sort of a double dose of the “female representation in creative industries” debate since that’s another realm where there’s a lot of discussion about it. One of the common responses you hear to this controversy is, “Maybe women aren’t in games or comics because they don’t want to be!”
Well, the women of comics – both seasoned veterans and newcomers – decided to at least disprove this statement, to demonstrate that, indeed, women want to make comics (even if they aren’t always superhero comics). The result: Womanthology: Heroic, a hulking hardcover of comic art and story which includes work from over 150 female creators (and, at its time, the most successful Kickstarter ever). At least some major players in the “mainstream” industry have taken notice, as IDW Publishing (who put out comics based upon many popular properties like Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Transformers, as well as exciting indie offerings like Locke & Key) has committed to publishing future Womanthology material with different themes.
From what I’ve seen, comics fandom has been much more welcoming of this initiative than, say, games probably would be, and though there’s occasional resistance, the bulk of readers seem to really want big publishers to have more women in their bullpens. Contrast this with the gaming community’s response to Feminist Frequency’s proposed series on video games, or (more relevant to this discussion) to BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler stating her opinions. Whatever one could say about the problems women face in the industry, this kind of thing certainly highlights how hostile some gamers can be to the idea that there are women making video games.
AJ: I think this issue is a demographics one. The average age of both video gamers, and comic book readers, has apparently increased over the last decade. But there’s a divide among video gamers that people are familiar with. It’s a gross oversimplification, but, there are “casual” gamers, and there are “core” gamers. Generally, when marketers think of core gamers, they think of the young male demographic, male teenagers and young adults. But the amount of casual gamers – older gamers who may sometimes also be (gasp) women – is increasing.
I think core gamers have this weird perception that the amount of games allowed to be made is finite.
Maybe they’re partially right. Games are increasingly expensive to create and produce. They are increasingly more complex – even the much-derided social game genre can take huge teams and long development cycles to create. And every group of talented game developers making a game “for women” isn’t working on the games that the loud “hardcore” players want. Core gamers have had it drummed into their heads that the amount of women playing games is increasing. And maybe they feel threatened by that.
Maybe they’d feel less threatened if they knew that the amount of women actually entering the industry has not increased very much. Women still only make up about ten to fifteen percent of the game industry. The biggest growth areas for women are on the business side, working jobs like PR or as managers or producers. When looking at straight development jobs, like art or programming, the percent of women in those roles is smaller. I have some thoughts on why that might be, but, what are yours?
Dix: Well, this is one area that I think there is a certain legitimacy to the argument that there are fewer women in games partially because there are fewer women trying to get into games, at least until relatively recently. At the Entertainment Technology Center, we have a pretty good male/female divide, but if you look at only the students for whom video games is the end goal (as opposed to film or location-based entertainment, say), the balance shifts notably toward the male end. There are women in that group, and it’s foolish to assert otherwise or that they don’t belong there, but they are a minority.
My undergrad school was once an all-female school and still has about a 60/40 women/men ratio, but even there, the computer science program had maybe half a dozen female students in it at any given time. I think it goes without saying that the reasons for the dearth of women in STEM fields are complex and being addressed at other levels with efforts to get more girls interested in such topics earlier, so it might be that we’ll just see this inequality even out a bit on its own with the next generation. These are areas that have historically been stereotyped, at least, as “guy” things, and I think a lot of the gap has to do with how these fields, and games themselves, have historically been viewed: you just don’t get lots of parents in the 80s or 90s that thought, “Nintendo! Perfect Christmas gift for my daughter!”
So I tend to point at the state of education and game marketing over the last few decades, rather than the industry itself, as the core of the reason we see such a gap. I always get a bit wary when the gap itself is pointed out as if it’s appeared out of the blue, with the sort of “guilty until proven innocent” assumption that it’s the game industry’s doing alone.
AJ: All true. But I think we do have to look at the industry itself.
I think we have to look at things like: Long hours, with crunch time. Lack of work/life balance. Often forcing families to relocate frequently to keep jobs. None of these things are particularly attractive to women.
We have to look at the “old boy’s culture” that’s prevalent in games. There was controversy this year, as there often is, about booth babes at E3, and whether or not they are appropriate. Hiring a spokesmodel in skimpy clothes is sort of a signal that the event is being held for the pleasure of men, and women are less than welcome there. And some women who are in the industry are upset about this practice, because it cheapens the role of the women who happen to be in production.
Now, you can go to GDC, and have wonderful intelligent conversations free from the spectacle of E3. But it’s harder to see that from the outside.
Dix: Don’t misunderstand: I think there’s lot of things the game industry does that could, and should, be changed. But I find the thought that these things are specifically “unattractive to women”, eh, suspect. I think they’re unattractive to most everyone regardless of sex, and to frame it like these are specifically things unfriendly to women sort of comes with the implication that they aren’t unfriendly to men – that men are somehow job-doing machines that don’t mind if their job rules their life. I’d by lying if I said I didn’t find that notion a bit offensive.
I think the kind of stuff some developers have to go through to get and keep jobs is just plain hostile, full stop. It’s hostile to family life, but we’ve seen the make-up of families and the career status of men and women in those situations change a lot. Every now and again we see the latest numbers about how “stay-at-home dads” are on the rise, that the division of labor when it comes to child care is pretty evenly split between both parents. And people tend to stay single longer and have fewer children.
Granted, there is the issue of maternity leave, and I’m not familiar with common numbers for the game industry there, but my understanding is that that’s one of many benefits that’s kind of on the downturn across the board for career women. By all accounts pregnancy and childbirth are pretty taxing, and I think it’s a bit repulsive how some employers are so concerned about the bottom line to not support their employees when they make the decision to have children. And in the end, people who have more personal experience with the topic than I (that is, women) should be the ones defining what’s necessary and proper.
Now, booth babes I don’t have any desire to defend at all – the pragmatic but unsatisfying answer is that “sex sells,” presumably. It’s a marketing thing, and I’m guessing it works on the segment of their audience that they expect it to. I agree that it perpetuates the “boys’ club” perception of video games and their audience, and think that reflects poorly on video games regardless of who you are. I hope that we’ll find, in the coming years, that that tactic is as antiquated in practice as it seems in theory.
AJ: I realize the work conditions of the game industry are hostile, often, to all people, regardless of gender or their gender role. But I think balancing work and family is something young men, in particular, don’t worry about in the same way. I think that’s where you get young men who are willing to let the industry sort of “churn them out.” In that respect, game work environments – and not all of them, certainly, but many of them – are toxic, in the sense that they’d rather use young men up and replace them, especially at the bottom of the totem pole in jobs like QA.
But societal pressures on women are different, and I feel like this is hard to see unless you’re living it. A young man can take a couple years and spend some time in a hectic job before he decides to start a family. Putting aside even the pressures of motherhood and maternity leave, a woman has other expectations laid on her even without kids. She is expected to, for example, handle domestic tasks necessary for the upkeep of a household, and most of the “emotional chores,” (things like sending out Christmas cards) all while remaining pretty – but not too pretty – or else you’re dumb and clearly don’t know anything about your job.
Stay-at-home Dads are a thing, but they’re not really part of society’s narrative. If you have a working Mom, and a Stay-at-Home Dad, it’s not considered as normal or acceptable as the reverse situation. Have you seen The Atlantic this month, showing a woman trying to smuggle a baby in her briefcase? It’s a pretty common image. You might try to have a fulfilling career, but there’s going to be someone whispering in your ear that it’s not really fulfilling the “right role.”
I think maybe it does come down to societal narratives overall. And one of the narratives that we still have is “women don’t make video games.” We know that’s not true. But it’s hard to attract more women until that perception is changed.
Dix: And I suppose what I’m saying is, I think we’re seeing signs of that narrative changing. The societal narrative of the last several generations, really, are definitely a big part of why the professional landscape is what it is, but I think that we’re seeing signs of that breaking down. I suppose that doesn’t do much good for women already in the industry, or currently trying to get in, but I would predict that, even absent particular initiatives to encourage more women to be game developers, we’d start to see women occupy a larger segment of the game industry from changes in social expectation alone.
My question would be, how do we enact change in social expectations unless we break them (or outright ignore them)? Don’t we, at some point, have to choose to defy those whispers in our ear if we want to see anything change?
It sounds like a bit of a paradox – “before women will want to make video games, women have to make video games.” But I think it’s probably true. It just seems like something else needs to be the get the ball rolling.
AJ: I think these changes are really slow. And I honestly don’t think they’re going to happen automatically.
I think we should start by making video games seem like a safer place for young women. A place where they see they have role models who are working in the industry, and a place where they see that those role models are respected.
To make that happen, women need to be unafraid to showcase themselves and their talent. I have read that women are less likely to want to speak at conferences than men, and this is one place where women could really step up and show that we are here. The GDC Microtalks this year featured many talented, smart women, and it was an inspiration to see them standing up on stage.
And, conversely, men need to show that those women are respected, too. I’m not saying that they aren’t – every studio culture is different. But even if you’re just a fan, and you feel like putting someone down for being a woman: maybe not do that. … I guess that is asking a lot.
Dix: It really shouldn’t be asking much, but I’m guessing there’s at least a certain set of game fans who would find the request completely unreasonable. I think that’s part of where the challenge comes from, of course: not only that women in the industry need to be a bit more visible, but that the audience needs to be more welcoming – or at least less hostile – to that reality. And for reasons I think I will never really understand, there is definitely a segment of that audience that has zero interest in doing that – possibly even interest in discouraging it.
But speaking of role models: we’ve certainly alluded to the idea that girls aren’t encouraged to even consider games (or many STEM careers) as a possibility, even when they are still years away from making any sort of career decision. Now, we’ve all seen the numbers that show that the gaming audience is creeping toward a roughly 50/50 split, all told, between women and men, and a lot of people cite the rise of the social/casual game as the cause. What sort of games do you think are really going to encourage young girls today to decide they want to make video games when they grow up?
AJ: I’m not sure what will, but what probably won’t are the social games or “pink games.” A lot of those games are about some other kind of fantasy career in and of themselves. A lot of girl games are about being a fashion designer or babysitter or chef, so that draws less attention to the game, and more attention to the fantasy of some other career.
Maybe we need an Imagine: Computer Programmerz.
Or we need more games that are about being games, in and of themselves, rather than fantasy career simulators and “playing house” aimed at little girls. It’s hard to tell how much of this happens because girls genuinely like that sort of thing, and how much happens because that’s the only sort of thing that’s presented to little girls. I do think that “what games are designed for girls” is drifting into a whole other topic, though!
Dix: A game about making video games? That sounds like it might get a little meta.
For my part, I think we need a Bill Nye the Science Guy. But for video games. And a woman. You get the idea.
Definitely a discussion to pick up for next time!
Email the authors at aj@tap-repeatedly.com and dix@tap-repeatedly.com!
Just because I can’t resist commenting on the last thing said, there is of course at least one game about making games: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=net.kairosoft.android.gamedev3en&hl=en
It’s kind of fun too.
Well said, all of it.
For a long time, I was a woman interested in eventually breaking into the gaming industry. For me, the interest faded when I learned more about the terrible working conditions so prevalent in the industry. That, coupled with a dose of reality (working 9-5, or often later; paying a mortgage; keeping up with home maintenance; just the thought of adding kids into the mix on top of everything else I already have on my plate) taught me just how impractical a job in the gaming industry would be in my situation.
If I weren’t already married and locked into a mortgage, I would probably still be working toward that dream, despite the promise of long hours, less pay, and almost zero job security. But I absolutely look at it as being “churned out” and something you do when you’re single and free of other responsibilities, and I believe that has to change or the industry is in trouble.
I definitely agree, Lauren (welcome, by the way), and I’m guardedly optimistic that the fact that independent studios are showing considerable success (and more each day) mixed with the intervals of outcry against the latest inside word from this studio or that is going to force the big offenders into a position that they at least need to be more competitive in offering employees pay, benefits, good conditions, and the like in order to attract and keep talent.
This is a great series of discussions, keep them up!
The challenge is systemic and tied to many things. As AJ pointed out, the average age of gamers is increasing; this is due in part to the fact that we were all young when video games became a thing (well, I was young at least), and we loved them, and we grew with them. For me it was never something I intended to abandon just because I got older. But when I was little I didn’t know any girls who played games, perhaps a clue to the start of the exclusionary cycle we’re now in.
There are so many fantastic opportunities in the games industry, for men and women… if the industry itself would abandon the shortsighted treatment of its own people, and if we could find a way further along the path to equality. Look at women like Amy Hennig, and Christine Love, Terri Brosius, and Tanya Jessen; well-placed, influential, and responsible (in whole or part) for some genuinely fantastic games. In fact, some of the best game experiences I can think of were heavily touched by women developers, all the way back to Reiko Kodama’s Phantasy Star work. A handful of data points may not make a trend, but I can say with confidence that many of the games I’ve loved the most may not have been what they were if it weren’t for the women who were part of making them. To me that alone is a reason why the industry has to keep moving forward in this matter. Quite simply, we may be missing out on some really great games otherwise.
Very interesting discussions Dix and AJ. It’s a shame it won’t all happen sooner but I’m confident that as the medium matures and it becomes as much of a fixture as cinema, literature, music, theatre etc. it will shed the societal narratives that it has grown up with.
Just to be clear as well, I think videogaming is already a fixture, I just think it’s got some way to go before its scope is truly appreciated by most people. Videogaming is still very much a medium that a lot of people openly dismiss because of the narrow viewpoint through which they see it and as far as I’m concerned dismissing an entire medium is pretty crazy whichever way you look at it! Yet, having said this, I’ve got a female friend who’s probably one of the smartest and most cultured people I know and she’s never really cared for gaming but that’s mainly because she never realised how diverse it is. She didn’t know about the indie scene, or experimental art-house games or mainstays like Portal and Shadow of the Colossus. I’m not quite sure what she thought it was, presumably Mario, WoW, CoD, Halo, GTA and Tomb Raider, or just distractions for kids, I don’t know, but I was surprised to say the least and glad to open her eyes a bit, even if she still doesn’t care much about them.
Hi guys,
Are the issues here any different from other areas of the leisure industries such as films, music and written fiction?
In each area the objective is to entertain and make money doing it, and the starting point has to be the target audience. A woman does not have to cater for a female audience any more than a man has to aim at a male audience, but as a generalisation it is probably easier to have an understanding of what will entertain persons of your own sex (or perhaps in this enlightened age we should be talking about sexual orientation, but that is probably a separate debate…).
If women are a growing part of the game playing community, then opportunities for female game makers may increase naturally insofar as we are talking about games which are specifically aimed at female game players.
On the other hand, if we are talking about games aimed at testosterone fuelled males, it will probably always take a rare type of woman to hit that target, or even be interested in doing so.
As to working hours/pay/conditions, that old chestnut applies to every industry, In western society we seem to expect the state or the employers to tilt the playing field to allow better working opportunities for everyone in virtually every trade/profession, but I am not convinced that this necessarily always helps achieve excellence. To stand out in a creative field you probably need to be some sort of obsessive workaholic of a type not easily assimilated into a normal family environment (whatevder that is…).
If the game, film, music, book, etc hits the spot, do any of us care what sex the creator is? If so, isn’t it sexist of us to say “wow, what a graet game for a woman to have created”? I plead guilty!
You raise some interesting questions, Lex. Game development can be compared to other creative industries in many ways, but there are also significant differences.
Other creative industries are either heavily unionized or heavily representative (or both); gaming is not. Employees of the games industry have no protections against corporate policies that demand ridiculous hours; no recourse if they’re fired for not adhering to such conditions; no representative mechanism by which agents or managers can demand benefits for star contributors; no established wage or crediting system; no systemic protection against sexist hiring practices or inequality in the workplace. Whether or not the state or the industry should rectify these problems I leave to others to decide, but while obsessive workaholism are common aspects of many creative industries, it’s dismissive to assume that since such behavior does occasionally manifest elsewhere, it’s okay in games.
Another factor in the working conditions/hours issue is the common misconception that working more hours means greater productivity. Countless studies have disproven this, showing a sharp increase in errors and drop in productive work as soon people begin working more than eight hours per day. The games industry continues to ignore this evidence… and, unironically, continues to ship broken, buggy products whose dev cycle often concludes with 10 months of 20-hour/7-day crunch work.
These days I think a lot of women who might be a great boon to the industry avoid it simply because it seems so unwelcoming. Aside from the long hours there are still often awkward working conditions – not necessarily harassment, I just mean… being one of two women in a 120-person studio, for example. Plus I’d bet there are many women who have no problem overcoming those challenges, but may feel creatively limited by the type of product so common in the industry.
Personally I think if women want to work in the games industry, they should have equal opportunity as men to do so – and that includes recognizing the different ways men and women work, and the different requirements they might have. With equality of opportunity, women in the games industry could (and should) be self-selecting. The issue here is that women are NOT choosing to work in games for a variety of reasons, many of them unfair. And since those women are choosing not to work in the industry, the industry is losing out on a great potential resource.
Here’s a link to back up Steerpike on how long hours decrease productivity. Among its other terrible effects, the overtime fetish probably disproportionately excludes women, who are less likely to have a stay-at-home or part-time-employed spouse to take care of any children they may have.
@Lex, I’ve heard the “target audience” argument before (for games as well as elsewhere) and I think there are a few fallacies in it. First of all, there’s the assumption that men can make games for men better than women can, which might make a certain amount of sense but doesn’t bear up if we look at other entertainment sectors. Some men are great at making entertainment women love and vice versa, and though we see this less in games right now, I think that’s a symptom rather than evidence to the contrary.
And, of course, there’s the pigeonholing of “games” into “things for guys.” I don’t necessarily expect to ever see a CoD dev team that is even as much as one-third female simply because I’ve met very few aspiring female game designers who want to get into the military FPS genre. But every game has its target audience, and that’s only one corner of the industry; obviously, lately we’ve got games that target a much broader audience, with social and casual games, but it’s easy to forget that there’s always been other target audiences, the anomalous “everyone” that a lot of Nintendo products have always tried to capture, plus things for younger age groups and stuff that just doesn’t have terribly gendered baggage. I know a lot more female fans of the sort of JRPGs that really proliferated around the turn of the century than I do male fans. Apocryphal data, I know, but there it is.
And, at the end of the day, I know some girls who like a good round of CoD every now and then.
Now, you are quite correct in observing that there’s a fine line between promoting equal representation/pay/etc. in the workplace and making female game developers into a sub-class of game developers. That kind of thing has happened frequently elsewhere. I’m not sure if there’s a way around it, however, as a whole, because if I’ve learned anything from some of the recent woman-related gaming news, it’s that for some people you’re going to have to POUND INTO THEIR SKULLS the *shocking* fact that women can make games they’ll like as well as or better than men can. But those of us who don’t need to be convinced can also avoid talking about it like it’s strange, and instead just talk about it like we would anything else.
Oh, and I’ve known a few of my female cohorts to really dislike most “girl games”, so I think I can pretty safely say that more jobs for women in the industry making such games would be…unsatisfactory.
I have no direct experience of how the gaming industry operates, but have always assumed that it would consist mainly of quite small teams at least some of whom could be working from home and/or outside normal office hours (given that the main item of equipment would be a computer).
Is this fair comment, and if so doesn’t that open the industry up to people who juggle career and family, still probably more often women than men?
On the other hand, I would also expect there to be a high level of megalomania among those who run such businesses and that appears to be a predominantly masculine trait…
What you describe is generally (in my experience) only true of the smallest of indie studios, often because they can’t afford office space.
Most game studios are dozens, if not hundreds, of people, and they go to work in some kind of building at desks and stuff. It’s pretty critical that they be in regular contact with the other people working on the same project (or at least the same part of that project), so working from home ends up being problematic, even for very small scale projects.
There’s also the fact that there’s a whole slew of proprietary software involved in game development (not least of which being the engine, and engines can cost in the six figures to license) which I’m reasonably certain companies don’t give out to their employees for home use, even if it is on the project.
Basically, there’s a lot of money sunk into all the stuff developers need to work with, and there’s a huge number of moving parts to coordinate. The circumstances necessitate being in a work environment. The deadlines handed down by corporate are usually what contribute to the ridiculous hours.
Speaking of corporate, game companies, at least the larger ones, are run like any other big business, and yes, that’s an area that tends to be male-dominated as well. The reasons for this are complicated, of course, but is probably at least partially that there are some sectors in which it is very difficult for a woman to get promoted to leadership positions even if she does more/better work than a man.
Yeah, in all my years in the industry I’ve never seen a commercial studio work virtually on a regular basis. Sure, people work from home from time to time, but no more than in any other business. Studios are usually bound to publishers as well, either as owned subsidiaries or via significant financial tendrils. It’s not at all uncommon for publishers, which tend to be quite corporate, to expect their developers to adhere to various corporate standards.
It’s not an uncommon mistake to assume that game development is small teams with enormous flexibility. That is, after all, how game development was (most of the time) in the early days. But things have changed. As Dix says, you’re usually looking at dozens to hundreds of people working on a project that may cost upwards of a hundred million dollars. More people may wear sandals to work in game development, but beyond that it’s a pretty professional world.
Part of the problem, actually, is that the independent garage culture of the early game industry does still flavor things in weird ways. There was a lot of “No Gurlz Allowed” back in the early eighties, which did in turn fuel the perception that games were a guy thing. Reality has changed but impressions have not.
Beyond the “boy-thing” viewpoint, there’s the “girls-aren’t-engineers” viewpoint. It’s amazing how gobsmacked some people in this business still look when they meet a woman who’s a coder. That feeds into some of the remarks Dix made in the article, about STEM education for women. Someone, somewhere, long ago, apparently decided that science and math are boy things. Of course, game development’s hardly the only industry still laboring under that strange assumption, but labor it does.
Interesting, but disappointing to learn that the gaming industry appears to have at least its fair share of dinosaurs when it comes to some of its attitudes in comparison to other areas of commerce.
Are there discernibly different trends in different countries – ie is sexism more apparent in some than in others?
Hmm. That’s honestly a question I don’t know the answer to. A little cursory googling hasn’t given me any by-country data.
My guess would be that it depends on the norms of the country in question, but I’d wager that there’s still a dearth of women in developer roles in general. Certainly these days, the US is not exactly the most female-friendly country ever, especially in the professional sector, so I would not be surprised if there’s somewhere that makes a better showing of it than we do.