Re: Women wanted as games programmers
> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4530583.stm
Thanks for pointing that out, Helen. The Guardian has an article on
this too
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1479780,00.html), which
includes a couple of interesting statistics: "Women make up only 17%
of the industry's workforce, with only 2% employed in technical and
software development positions." Interesting that the percentage of
women in technical games development positions is as low as the
percentage of women involved in free software development.
Josie Fraser first alerted me to the Guardian article in her blog post
(http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/05/uk_computer_gam.html) a
couple of days ago. She makes a great point: "The University are going
to hold some taster days to try and address the problem. Good for
them. But it's a national issue that needs to be addressed nationally,
as well as consistently, starting with 5 year old kids. And we also
need to address this constant type-casting of girls and women as
interested in fundamentally different genres of games than boys. The
insistence that women only like nurturing, co-operative non-violent
titles is an old chestnut that turns up again and again in these kind
of articles and is probably more about reinforcing gender stereotypes
than who actually plays what and when and why."
Josie's remark reminds me of a thread on Slashdot a few years ago
which discussed whether women need an OS specifically designed for
women (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/16/0748211) -- another
example of type-casting women and girls, and in a way that is even
more pertinent to Debian Women. (The article linked to by Slashdot was
not suggesting the creation of such an OS, but rather pointing out
that many members of LinuxChix found the idea to be
counter-productive; many of the Slashdot commenters, however, had
other ideas.)
--
hanna m. wallach
blog: http://join-the-dots.org/
work: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/hmw26/
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