Gender and Games

It is fairly obvious for any average onlooker that the games industry is extremely segregated when it comes to gender dominance. Traditionally the games industry was seen as extremely 'nerdy' and therefore unappealing to a mainstream audience, let alone a female audience. Recently though, in the last decade, the market has been slowly opening up as more modern views on  gaming are created; there are now games for every person, males, females, children and adults. Although the market for games has expanded, can the same be said for the industry?


By looking at the United Kingdom National Gamers Survey 2009 we can get some factual representation of the industry. The Gamers Survey provides authoritative data on gamers across all main game platforms and covers key European markets and the US.

As you can see in the first chart above, the ratio between males and females playing games are actually fairly similar, there is a slight increase in males playing over females, but generally speaking they're on even footing. The same can't be said for average hours, as it's apparent that males generally spend a lot more time playing games than females. For the 13 - 19 years, males spend more than 3x the time playing video games than females.


All of the charts reflect the same basic idea, although there are a lot of female gamers, they don't tend to play games very often.

A report by the online games magazine, MCV (2008) suggests that the percentage of women within the games industry in core creation or developmental roles is around just 6.9%. More recent figures produced by Skillset (2009) found that women represent 4% of the game industry’s workforce, a decrease from 12% in 2006 (Skillset, 2006). Even the small percentage of female employees consist of jobs such as marketing and writing, and rarely occupy jobs which affect the game in big ways such as art or coding.


It's quite shocking to see this huge segregation in a medium which is thought to be getting a broader audience over time, so why is this happening? I believe that it's just a mindset that's been put in place over many years and that it won't change so suddenly. There may be more games targeted at girls, but it doesn't mean girls will find the idea of creating these games more appealing. Despite the figures, I still think over time the gender segregation will decrease, but for now it will have to remain a male-dominated industry.