Gender and Gaming

Originally computer gaming was thought of as a pastime for young males, and one which was just for the geekiest members of the population. Over the years gaming has become more mainstream, allowing it to appeal to a wider audience. Both the popularity of gaming, and the technology behind it, has improved tremendously over time.

The graph below shows the percentage of the uk population that plays video games, and the average number of hours spent per week on video gaming (split into make and female respectively):

As you can see, the percentage of people that play video games is fairly evenly spread between males and females. However, the graph also shows that males tend to play video games a lot more often than females.

So overall,  playing video games does not seem to tend towards one gender over the other, but how about when it comes to making video games?

Only about 4% of people employed in the video games industry are female. And of this 4%, very few of them actually have roles that influence the creation of the video games. As shown in the table above, very few women are employed as programmers or audio engineers. The design and art side of the industry also has a low percentage of female employees - most females tend to be employed in admin and PR roles.

So while video gaming as a whole is currently quite balanced, actually getting into the video games industry is another matter entirely. That won't stop me from trying though!