I'm really confused about what problems women face in the game industry. In my own experiences, I have seen very little problems with their integration and have worked well with several women. Could someone give me a high level understanding of the situation?

Quote: Original post by zyrolasting
I'm really confused about what problems women face in the game industry. In my own experiences, I have seen very little problems with their integration and have worked well with several women. Could someone give me a high level understanding of the situation?

It might help if you state where you live , the situation is likely to differ greatly between regions, The fact that most game developers are male doesn't necessarily mean that women face any special problems.

I hover between Mississippi and Georgia. (I'd rather be living in a septic tank, but I can't afford even that [smile]) For the sake of sparking discussion, what is the gender-imbalance hot spot at the moment? What are the major problems that women are facing? I did not immediately see the need for objectives listed here, hence my asking.

they have problems in the games industry? AFAIK, there's always a "Women In" support group in every career field out there.

That was my first thought. I actually read this earlier, and now I'm not as concerned. I'm still curious about projected problems though.

A lot of nerdy/nervous guys trying to work with women...? Well when programming first started it was a bunch of nerdy guys in there garage and it seemed like that for a long time. Now you have a bunch of girls that play hardcore games. I would say that as of today it's not much of an issue.

A fair assessment of underlying problems.

From the article:

Quote: any woman who wants to be in a STEM field should be able to get as far as talent, hard work, and desire to succeed will take her

Mmkay, makes sense.

Quote: If there are women who dream of being in STEM but have felt themselves driven off that path, the system is failing them. And the system is failing itself, too; talent is not so common that we can afford to waste it.

...If we really want to fix the problem of too few women in computing, we need to ask some much harder questions about how the field treats everyone in it.

Err, ok?

Quote: The problems they did report were much worse. They centered on one thing: women, in general, are not willing to eat the kind of shit that men will swallow to work in this field.

Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: “Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?”

Quote: and having no life

Quote: because they’re easily hooked into a monomaniacal, warrior-ethic way of thinking in which achievement of the mission is everything

I now have frostbite.

My double standard radar is squealing now. How is this a fair assessment? I heard this same thing in Mississippi State, where men were associated with this robotic "need to solve the puzzle" and women are the great social philosophers in computing that we need to lull into the industry or else men are "sexist" again. I think I'm about to take the stand that this is a bunch of shit unless there are non-biased undertones I'm missing.

o_O WTF? Outdated generalisations much?

Quote: Now let’s talk about death marches, mandatory uncompensated overtime, the beeper on the belt, and having no life. Men accept these conditions because ***. Women, not so much. Much sooner than a man would, a woman will ask: “Why, exactly, am I putting up with this?”

We don't have any female programmers at work at the moment, but the females in the other disciplines (such as management/artistic fields) put up with this shit just as much as the men do -- it's the nature of the business. In fact, the ones that complain the loudest are all guys, so perhaps I can generalise that the superior tact of the female causes them not to complain, but that's just as stupid.

Quote: Correspondingly, young women in computing-related majors show a tendency to tend to bail out that rises directly with their comprehension of what their working life is actually going to be like. Biology is directly implicated here. Women have short fertile periods, and even if they don’t consciously intend to have children their instincts tell them they don’t have the option young men do to piss away years hunting mammoths that aren’t there.

None of the girls that dropped out of my comp-sci/IT courses said they did so because they were worried about wasting their fertile years doing unpaid overtime instead of breeding (seriously, what generation is this line of thinking from?)... Most of them just lost interest - the ones that didn't are now game-programmers putting up with the same crappy conditions as the rest of us... Some of the ones that lost interest are working different fields (e.g. law or management) that also have long working hours.

The problem that I've seen is that there was a very imbalanced ratio going into the education system in the first place. This is long before anyone really knows what the working conditions are going to be like, and the education system even had "affirmative action" type policies in place to make it easier for girls to get in. This leads me to believe that the differing levels of interest in science/technology stems from primary/secondary education, which results in an imbalanced gender ratio in tertiary education, which results in an imbalanced gender ratio in the field.
So, do your bit by buying your daughter a chemistry set instead of a barbie doll!