Maybe there are a few cases where this is true, but I don't believe this is necessarily the reason. Even excluding game design, there should be a lot more programmers who are women, but there aren't.Blu wrote:All of this hypothetical conjecture that women aren't interested in a game design. Is it because it's consumed mainly by men? What prevents it from being more accessible and inclusive to women who are interested in the medium? I'd venture a guess:
It's the fact that the field is already heavily dominated by men. Any acknowledgement of, "I don't think women are interested in game development," is a fallacy and maintains the status quo. I'm certain there's women that would love to develop games, but they take a look at the ways they're depicted in the ones that exist, and they see that it's toxic and inhospitable. This doesn't even mention what the actual culture of being a woman in such a firm/developer/office/workplace and factors that might make their experience insufferable.
Also, while the numbers give women as a large contingent of the gaming populace, a good deal of them are not what we'd consider traditional gamers, and don't have the sort of desire to get into that school of game design.
I'm not saying don't try to get them into it. Some of the best designers in the world have been women. But the answer is not to stomp out the existing industry, the answer is to get them involved with competing products.
Sometimes, though, some jobs are just inherently more appealing to men than to women, and vice versa. We have to be honest with ourselves and decide whether the gender gap in a particular field is something that is a real issue, or something that naturally arises from cultural, social, and biological reasons. I don't think there are less women in the game industry because working conditions for them are somehow bad or that all the men that work there are raging misogynists. One could make a counter-argument that fields dominated by women are full of misandry, but I suspect in most instances it isn't true, despite a marked gender gap existing.
