Girls in the UE Community

[AndrewO]

@DamirH;253322

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.

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.