Where Are All the Female Game Designers?

There is a question that keeps being asked across many gaming companies and even some gaming sites: Where are the female game designers? And it’s not just a question for the gaming industry, but any industry largely connected to the computer science departments. And it’s not to say there aren’t women who are game designers. ArenaNet has a multitude of them, and most people know about Jennifer Hepler and similar women that have received death threats (which is not exclusive to women game designers). So there are definitely some, with high level jobs and have been around for decades.

But we know that the numbers are sad for game developer women, at barely around 12% (though it is definitely rising). Some people have said it was because women don’t really like or play games but we have statistics that now prove otherwise on that, with almost an even split between men and women gamers. Despite these statistics though we largely see the gaming industry still believing that it is mostly men (and many gamers as well) that occupy the gaming world.

One designer even recently asked and started a twitter tag sensation to find out more about why many women game developers just aren’t around. And the answers do shed some light on a few areas.

Pay Disparity

We do still have current numbers that suggest many women are still making significantly less than men, and Lindsay Lockhart (Lead Narrative Designer for Halo 4) even mentions that it is rather prevalent in the gaming world, which was only known from a survey. But is this pay disparity because it was only recent that more women have jumped into the game designer seat, so men are being counted as having ‘more experience’ and receiving higher pay because of it.

We aren’t entirely sure, but based on evidence there definitely is some reason behind this. And a few other women game developers suggest some of those areas are because despite many women game developers working hard to get a promotion, often times when they do it’s simply put off as being because they had a nice figure.

Hostile Environment

And having a promotion chalked up to your physical form isn’t the only thing many women face in the gaming world at large. There’s a rather high percentage of a hostile environment with the online gaming world, because it’s apparently okay to be hostile. It’s not just women getting death threats, many call of duty male designers have gotten them too. But when you combine a level of hostility plus many people doubting the capabilities of a woman game developer and a lower chance of receiving competitive pay and you can start to see why many women just simply turn away from it before getting far into the world.

While men do get some hostile heat, there just isn’t a good way to compare or say that it’s even remotely equal. It’s clear this hostile environment (seen rather well with games like the community in League of Legends) can be completely destroying to a lot of women, to the point that they often won’t disclose their gender because of the amount of harassment they received as ‘women gamers’ compared to the average amount as a ‘male gamer’.

Improvements

Luckily we are seeing a lot of groups and programs that are actually being directed at drawing in more women into not just the gaming field, but computer sciences and programming at large. The Alice software has been out for a while though, which was created originally to teach girls to get into the programming 3d models, and recently we even see Girl Scouts touching on the subject with their Be the Game Developer. But is this able to actually reach the kids and people it needs?

We won’t really know how many women push more into the game design degrees and schools, until we’ve had more time to see the effects of these types of programs directed at the younger women. At least they do have the right idea to get women more involved at a young age, but that means we aren’t likely to see as many female game developers until another five to ten years down the road.