Recently, I’ve been checking my UE Blog / YT channel stats and found that UE4 community is totally dominated by men.
YT stats:
://i.imgur/BBcgBVl.png?1
ofc, I know some girls who like to play games (and they are quite rare I think) but girls who can actually make games or are interested in such technologies? These are pure unicorns. My that’s the situation in my country, Poland.
I’m just wondering why is that. UE and making games is .
p.s In this 2.7% there are: my mom and my GF and probably some guys who set up “female” just for fun
There’s been a few studies to this, and what it boils down to is that is a culture/sub-culture thing. We could go on and on with the topic, but it would end up in the same place, as this is a chicken/egg problem.
Basically, it boils down to upbringing / schooling / culture.
It’s interesting. Your perception is not uncommon, but it’s actually not true when it comes to gamers. When you look at the makeup of the modern game playing audience, most recent data shows that a slight majority (~52%ish) are women now. Women gamers are actually not rare. We no longer live in a world where just boys and young men buy and play video games. Yet, the perception that women don’t game persists. Women who blog or YouTube about games are often labeled as “fake gamer girls” and are subjected to a wide variety of unsavory comments and even rape and death threats. It’s not hard to imagine why less women gamers blog about games.
In GameDev, however, there is definitely truth to the perception. Although there’s been some progress recently, a lot of gaming and game dev communities are, frankly, just not very welcoming to women. Or, for that matter, to anyone who’s not from that traditional gaming demographic. The reasons for that are complex and sometimes contentious and I hesitate to get that conversation going here, but hopefully, we will learn to do better. To do that, we have to recognize not only that there’s a problem, but that we contribute to it, often without meaning to.
If you really would like to see more women participating here and in game development in general, you might consider not using the diminutive term “girls” to refer to grown women, for example. It may not seem like a big deal, and I’m sure you meant nothing by it, but little things like that can make a community seem less welcoming. It’s already intimidating enough for a woman to come into an existing community that’s 97% men, especially in light of the way women gamers are often treated online. If our language conveys to them (even if unintentionally) that we think of them as less, it will magnify that intimidation and make them less likely to join and to participate.
This is extremely misleading as it includes social FB games, Candy Crush & Co. I do not know the numbers for the console / PC market, but I wager they are quite different.
However, this is an interesting remark. Most mainstream media today will have you believe that the gaming community is anti-women, but the above YT statistic proves such notions false. The UE community is nothing if not welcoming to everyone and anyone. I have never seen anyone shunned or dismissed on the forum or on the IRC chat, yet still it’s as male dominated as it is. The fact of the matter is that if this was a makeup forum the stats would be reversed, i.e. it’s just a simple fact of men being on average more interested in the topic than women.
I wholeheartedly disagree with the notion that there is a problem or that “progress” is being made, or needs to be made in any case. People are hired (and should be hired) based on their qualifications, not to fill some arbitrary diversity quota. One of Fortnite’s developers is a woman, she often talks in the #unrealengine IRC channel and despite her being (to my knowledge) the first woman to post there no one has made her feel unwelcome at any point. I’ve worked for several relatively huge companies in the past few years, both had >30% of women employees and there was never any trouble, and if you look at online communities (especially gaming communities) you will struggle to find unwelcoming atmosphere toward anyone.
The sad truth is that there are people today who just like to be offended. The notion that using the term “girl” instead of “women” (or “boy” instead of “man” for that matter) is somehow offensive is juvenile, petty and quite frankly, laughable.
If anything IS offensive, it’s baselessly claiming that a gaming / game dev community (and by extension this one) is not welcoming to someone just based on its demographic.
DamirH is correct, a lot of women play mobile and web games casually, but not much else. Riot games released a bunch of statistics for League of Legends (most played game there is) a while ago, and over 90% of the players at the time were male.
I don’t know if that’s true, there are thousands of people in the community and most don’t use there real names so you couldn’t tell whether they are male or female, although it doesn’t really matter in the end anyway as long as they make stuff, just my opinion:)
Every time I see a woman on game making field, most of the time she is not involved with direct development. It’s pretty rare. They go most of the time the management or PR route.
That’s because they are way too smart… They get a MBA and become our bosses instead suffering on the battlefield
I imagine this thread will be locked soon, but I might as well get my two cents in before it is done. Unfortunately DamirH, this entire post reads like blissful ignorance, and is part of the problem in our industry (I work in the software industry outside of making games as a hobby). It’s similar to many people in the US who insist that racism is dead because Obama was elected despite the mountain of evidence that racism still exists at both an individual and institutional level.
In a perfect world, everyone would be hired based on their abilities (as in a “judged by the content of their character” type of thing in the words of Martin Luther King), but unfortunately we aren’t even close to that spot in the software industry. I have worked at very progressive places that do merit based hiring and promoting, but that is far from the norm. For example, recently a major gaming company announced that after some internal investigations they found that they have been routinely bypassing women for promotion, instead they were promoting less qualified male candidates. To correct this they promoted a small number of women (about 50 I believe). The company has over 4,000 employees, and they didn’t even say what department those women were being promoted (how many were HR or Marketing as opposed to the development departments for example). Despite that this small number of new managers would register barely a blip on their overall structure (I’d guess they have about 750 people in management already), the internet exploded. Not to praise them for doing this good deed, but instead to lament the poor men who clearly were being shafted by these under-qualified women. This is the world we gamers live in.
I’m a white, male, successful developer (hell, I’m even tall and athletic), my life is about as easy as you can imagine. I don’t get death or rape threats for having an opinion on twitter, get groped in the hallway at conventions or bars, get followed home by angry men who for some reason think I slighted them. I don’t get accused of being a “fake gamer”, I don’t get questioned about why I got my job, and whenever I make a decision that my employees, nobody makes cracks about it being that time of month, or me being bossy.
Just because you don’t see all the problems in our industry doesn’t mean they don’t exist.
If i see women in the gamedev scene, i see them in the artist section. Although i also saw women using the snowdrop engine (just an example) in their engine spotlight.
I also know alot women who are gaming (currently sitting with one in teamspeak). They are not only playing candycrush, but yes, the handy and facebook games are more
suited for most of them.
I also have lots of women in my IT class that i give in university. I know that a large portion of them come from the economy modules, but still they are learning how to code in c.
Also many of my female friends like to play games, but they end up playing offline games (Assassins Creed or something like that) and older games (like the Legend of Zelda).
So you won’t find any statistics involving them.
Yeah same, I have seen some really talented women in gamedev who have rolled their own engines, tools, etc.
Women can be really smart and creative if they put their mind to it.
I personally think we should focus on the merits and accomplishments of the individual or team opposed to the gender.
Because at the end of the day it is about what you can do in gamedev that counts.
First of all i want to say that fact i’m moderator here, all i say is my opinion is not Epic opinion. I know this topic is very sensitive, aspecially now days, so i want state that out.
I didn’t heard of any female gamer being called “fake gamer” other then female ultra liberals that talking about “change” the industry and being accused of not playing games. I think you base those opinions on that group of people, instead of real female gamers, especially that you also mention “death or rape threats” on twitter.
I don’t see issue for woman to join game development industry, in my opinion fact that male is majority here comes more of cultural alignment then some serious barriers that liberals think there is, it same as man is less interested in fashion shopping then woman. Before i joined more international groups on Internet (and i’m also from Poland btw), in my teen times for around year or two is was participating in “amature” e-sporting of RTCW:Enemy Territory, ofcorse majority of scene was male players, but if female appeared they usually been treated like a queen, being female you could easily get to clan, your skill don’t need to be high, just for staying for company. I believe this behavior was caused from fact that man feels alone in there hobby, majority of girls (atleast in my country) is not interested in gaming, not because boys won’t let them… because they simply not interested in gaming, i even meet girl once that was hurt that her boyfriend spend too much time on playing games then being interested with there relationship. I can also say something about LittleBigPlanet where i participate in community activities to this day (), it a game where if you get serious it’s a great entry point for game development industry, lot of people i know and that takes level making more seriuesly they aim for that goal (in fact since Media Molecule put LBP aside and give torch to Tasier and Sumo they hired a lot of top community members to make story levels for LBP and LBP3) and i know 2 female community members that are serious in aim on that goal. In this community males are still visible majority, but females part is not so small, at least to level that seeing female player or level maker is something common and not unusual. As somebody who gone deep in to this community i can ensure you i never ever seen or heard any female player or level maker being decriminalized female for sole reason of her being a female, if you meet aggression in this game (which sadly is common thing too) it’s mainly comes from immature kids or teens where there lot of them there too and male players get equile about of that stuff as much as female. And it not because character is uniform (in fact it still being called Sackboy, even through some gamers with liberal views protest to call him Sackthing all the time), it’s because game is more oriented on artistic work and hangout with friends (theres even house levels which only point is to sit there play around and talk) and fact that Sackboy is like doll which playing with is considered feminine thing, art is also thing that seeing woman in art is not something unusual (as eXi mention you see woman mainly in that part in game dev), so it makes LBP more attractive for them.
Thats why i don’t believe there some serious walls either in gaming and game development for woman to come in, in fact i believe majority of man would be more happy about it to shere there interest. If people really want to push female devlopers in to industry, i think best would be by pulling female artists where there a lot more of them. Working around indies teached me that any artist with skill regardless who he are and what kind of art he is doing is good to work with in game industry, if people really want to bring “change” they should start by doing that insited of accusing others for who they are not and for opinions that usually the don’t shere, i believe results would be more effective and at least more peaceful.
I also don’t think this thread should be closed as long as we have normal discussion, i think discussion is only good solution for industry boiling topics.
This is what I was talking about, blissful ignorance. Search Google for “XBox Live rape threats” or really any sort of combination of sexual harassment and gaming and you will find plenty. It’s not just the Anna Sarkessians and Brianna Wu’s of the world getting threatened. As for “fake gamers”, articles like this sort of answer that one:
://www.bbc/news/magazine-18280000
See, this is just a whole lot of opinion which ignores facts, which again is just blissful ignorance. That’s great that you don’t think it should be a problem, but that doesn’t make it so. So let’s counter your personal opinion with actual research and facts, which are dead easy to track down:
://www.wired/2014/04/tom_pw/ (this is the github incident where a female engineer was harassed by a male employee and threatened by the wife of one of the founders)
I could add plenty more but I hope you get the point. There are serious problems in our industry right now, and while there are plenty of good people trying to improve it, it still isn’t improving nearly fast enough. But what I find weird is that people who aren’t in the industry who don’t know much about it go out of their way to not believe there are problems rather than keeping an open mind and doing five minutes of their own research.
This is why I thought this thread will be locked, because there really is no debate to why women are leaving (or won’t even enter) tech and gaming so even trying to make it one is just a waste of time. It’s like starting a thread on climate change and ignoring all the evidence it exists just for the formality of maintaing the illusion that there is a valid argument on the other side. Just a waste.
So as a moderator, keep it open or lock it, it’s up to you. But having white males come in and say they think the industry is fine, while hundreds, and in the case of the Harvard study, thousands of women disagree kind of puts it all in perspective. Like I said in my previous post, it’s like when my mother-in-law, a white, middle class teacher from New Jersey claims there is no racism in America anymore because Obama was elected. Sure, she has the right to her opinion, but that doesn’t mean it carry’s any weight.
What are you trying to prove here? Do you think by posting articles from liberal media somehow proves your point? You forget the US is not the only country in the world right?
If you self hate yourself so bad please perform a *** change.
AndrewO - Women are not leaving game development because of sexual harassment. If some one harasses you sexually you go to Human resources and tell them what happened. They will then take action. If they do not you have every right to sue that company and/or person. But only after you got to human resources. That is a common scare tactic uses by people in sections of Social media. I know this because I fell for this tactic at one point. But when I started to look into it… It was not really true.
Ok cool it down, he just responding to my post, i really didn’t want to make people yell at each other, i though we could have good discussion somehow… i guess i was too naive,sorry >.<
AndrewO, what i said is honest description of my personal experience on that matter and opinion based on it, take it as you like. I was never part of professional game development (yet?), so i not know what things look there, all i can say is how things look on amateur side of things and i kind of consider LBP as miniature game development industry I just wanted is add my cents
I think we all have some valuable input here, yes I really think there is still much to work on equality not only in the games industry but in our whole society, there might be always pending work to be done on side or the other.
From my personal experience in the professional industry is still dominated by males, not in a sexist way because nearly all male colleagues that I had where very welcome to have female members in the team and all female members that we had where fully integrated both in the development cycle and the whole company.
In my personal life my wife is a dev, she is an concept artists and she had not one issue of being a woman. One think that she noticed though is that while every dev she knew where all but a male chauvinist the actual products are indeed still basically male oriented. Only time will be able to balance it well and I’m sure that it will be not too long until we have both more female gamers and devs all around.
Well that didn’t take long. Two people say there is no problem, not based on research or facts, but just because their personal experience. I’m just trying to show a counter point which does actually include the opinions of the people effected by the problem.
If you want to counter any sort of rebutal with by going down the “liberal media” route then there’s really not much to talk about.
