Gender in Games

You wont need to do alot of research to know that the gaming industry is lacking female workers. 30 years ago  where the video gaming industry was starting to stand on its own two feet, the target audience were men. Only in the past decade have woman been noticed in the industry, but as Prescott and Bogg show in their article, it seems that the gaming industry is still male dominated.

Prescott and Bogg talk about the employment of women in the industry. They list a few points about what are the main issues are in segregation of the gaming industry :

- Young people are still choosing jobs in which their gender in represented.
-Women are both underrepresented in the games industry workforce as a whole and in certain roles within the industry
-Women in the industry tend to be concentrated in more traditionally ‘feminine’ roles e.g Marketing
- Women are underrepresented in some of the main game production e.g coding, art, designing etc

Their facts show that only 0.4% of women in UK are in lead (which include director, and management roles). Their research from Haines  show that 23% of senior positions were held by women, yet the catch is that senior positions meant managerial and less technical roles rather than direct game development.

Looking at chart for the 2009 'percentage of UK population playing games and time spent'  you can see that males have a higher percentage for playing games then females, but only slightly. the rest of the charts seems to have the same sort of percentage outcome to the first one.
From the fact sheet it shows that a lot females do play games, almost on par with males, so why is there still s major difference with female to male ratio in the gaming industry? From what Prescott and Bogg say, i believe that 'young people who chose jobs that represent their gender' plays a huge role in this. But with the increasing amount of females playing games and getting interested in the field of gaming, maybe in the near future we will see the female ratio increase.