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July 2005
| IT Week
Must women go into games? There are more vital issues than making leisure software female-friendly. At E3, the world’s largest computer games show, held in Los Angeles last month, Doug Lowenstein was emphatic. President of America’s Entertainment Software Association, he insisted: ‘We need a cultural shift so that young girls and women feel that playing games is not a testosterone-monopolised hobby reserved for their boyfriends and husbands’. Something is going on here, and not just in America. Earlier in May, the BBC reported how the University of Derby had launched a degree in games programming, had gained 106 applicants – and then had found that all were men. It’s a vicious circle, according to the course’s acting programme leader John Sear: men write games that men like playing, which in turn attracts simply men into the industry. 1 We’re likely to hear more about this. In August, the University of Abertay, Dundee, will hold a three-day conference on women in games. And now that Tony Blair has appointed James Purnell as Creative Industries Minister, with a brief to make Britain the world’s creative hub, we can expect some serious hand-wringing about the lack of female representation in games jobs. Of course, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell last year listed computer games as one of the factors behind that scourge of modern British life, obesity. 2 But the new quest to get women into games-programming roles is more serious. Today’s games geeks are tomorrow’s mainstream programmers. 3 So when the government takes up the cause of women games developers, isn’t it striking a wider blow against sexual discrimination in the IT industry? Not in my book it isn’t. As the radical British writer Jennie Bristow has shown, today’s women – and especially younger women – suffer relatively little discrimination in the general labour market. 4 The unwillingness of females to enter games programming is probably just that: unwillingness. It is not that women are frozen out of games development, but that they don’t much want in. They often prefer, and in modern Britain can often get, jobs in HR or PR. Harvard President Larry Summers was right to ask, in January, why women are under-represented in such a key area as the mathematical sciences – even if he did hint that genetics was the answer. By the same token, the relative absence of women from general UK software houses is a problem. But must girls be given special training courses in games software, in the implicit hope that they should, sooner or later, make up half the workforce in UK computer games production? Yes – but only if you share New Labour’s unconscious dream of making one in every two British plumbers a woman. The coming furore about girl gamesters is more about social engineering than software engineering. Of course, there is a big market opening up for games that differ from Grand Theft Auto and appeal strongly to women – like The Sims, for instance. The fondness women have for mobile phones, together with the spread of games to mobile platforms, also promise more female-orientated ‘product’; and already Indian games software houses, complete with at least some women in programming rather than admin or art direction roles, are very active in the mobile domain. Me, I’m more interested in whether Indian women, who really are oppressed, get millions of jobs in IT than I am in whether a few thousand British women get to design animations that are testosterone-free.
1 Quoted in ‘Women wanted as games programmers’, BBC News, 9 May 2005
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