Re: Women wanted as games programmers
On 11/05/2005, at 7:32 PM, Hanna M. Wallach wrote:
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."
Absolutely. I ran some special courses in mathematics for women (having
to completely reteach myself first, since I was the only girl in my
maths class :( ) and the barriers are not in capacity or inclination,
they're in whether we _believe_ we can, or ought to learn these things.
Women are using all those basic thought patterns every day ... but they
often don't recognize the fact, and in general have shockingly low
confidence in those areas.
We still have a long way to go.
from Clytie (vi-VN, team/nhóm Gnome-vi)
Clytie Siddall--Renmark, in the Riverland of South Australia
Ở thành phố Renmark, tại miền sông của Nam Úc
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