When thinking about this issue’s Editor’s Note, I went poking around for numbers to help describe the landscape of women in games. I started with the usual suspects, the ESA:
“Thirty-eight percent of all game players are women. In fact, women over the age of 18 represent a significantly greater portion of the game-playing population (30%) than boys age 17 or younger (23%).”
Interesting. This seems like a rather significant portion of the population. So I checked internal sources … The Escapist Staff page. I figured this would be a good location to find people who are really into games; certainly we must be if our careers center around them. I counted the total in-house staff, and then measured the number of women.
Know what the percentage of women is? 30%.
So, I expanded my digging to include The Escapist‘s parent company, Themis Group, as a whole. Themis Group is the mother company for several businesses, from our media assets (of which The Escapist is one) to the marketing company to the community services division. The unifying factor of all these divisions is that they are all focused on supporting or covering games. Again, a good place to find people who are into games, ie. they likely play games.
Know what the percentage of women is? 30%.
I guess maybe there is something to all this talk about the number of women playing games is increasing. And from my (admittedly very limited) research, we’re not just playing them, but we’re making careers out of working with them. And that’s pretty exciting.
And so, I feel pretty good about returning to the issue of women in games in this week’s issue Girl Power 2. John Walker discusses some research suggesting a relatively unexplored barrier to women’s entry to the gaming space: a need for permission. Bonnie Ruberg returns this week and wonders why she has never played a little girl in a game. And Justin McElroy chats with a couple of the early members of one of gaming’s most heavily women-influenced design studios, Sierra. Find these articles and more in this week’s issue of The Escapist.
Cheers,
-Julianne Greer
Published: Jun 20, 2006 12:00 pm