But in reality this does not happen, and there is plenty of proof of that. Why is it so hard to believe that the world doesn’t always work the way we want it to (or how it’s supposed to)?
So when thousands of women say there is a problem, they’re all making it up as scare tactics? Even the ones who have already left the industry and are in other careers? You can’t honestly believe that.
You are allowed to have personal experiences and your opinion of course, but you framed the entire post as if there are no problems because you personally haven’t seen any problems but in reality, you have been exposed to the tiniest fraction of the gaming development and tech world.
Let’s take a stupid hypothetical situation, say there are reports all over the country that people who ate the Super Duper Burger Combo at some mythical Fast Food Joint were getting sick, the suspected cause being some bad meat from their central warehouse or something. It’s more than a few people too, the cases are in the tens of thousands, but you had a burger there today before the news got out. If you didn’t get sick, would you go post on line that all burgers must be fine, because hey, the burger you had was fine? You do realize by doing so, you are effectively calling those tens of thousands of people liars and letting the fast food company off the hook for any problems.
If I replied to your post with articles showing the number of sick people would people like Errvald come in all hostile, blame liberal media and tell me to that if I hated myself so much I should just become a vegetarian?
This is what’s happening in this thread (and frankly, all over the internet). Women and men inside the industry say there is a problem, men outside the industry say there isn’t or there at least in their opinion there shouldn’t be, so dismiss the idea that there’s a problem. I tend to believe the former, not the latter. This isn’t all that hard.
Generally, there is no actual real difference, the problem is society and that. If i go to my university, in every engineering degree, there is less than 10% girls. in some degrees like my Computer science one, its less than 5%. How do you want more women in the industry with rates like that. Normally, women in science like the biological ones more.
On games, its actually very skewed depending on the type of game, hardcore as **** games, specially if they are multiplayer, are almost completely men only. A recent study said that DOTA and counter strike were more than 95% male, too hostile for girls there. On the other hand, on casual games, its normal to see more girls playing. Of course, skills are mostly the same, but most girls get annoyed by the constant hostility in “hardcore” games and just dont play them.
I remember being carried in counter strike by a girl(mic voice was obvious), and she was the best of our team. No one of the team cared about the fact that she was female, in fact, ive seen more problems with 13 year old kids and the like than girls when playing. In other games, you can see the “omg a grill” respones, wich are very annoying.
I get death threats by russians in dota daily, and insults in every european lenguage there is. Yet i just ignore them and mute them, no problem.
I see that you have not worked for any company yet. Because if someone complains that you have harassed them sexually you immediately become a possible liability. The company legally has to take action or they risk being sued for everything that they are worth by the harassed employee. If this is a major publisher they have to take action. Again for reasons listed above.
Any proper company which does not want to get sued will take action.
I really do not know where all this mis-information is coming from.
I am going to cite and old phrase my dad used to tell me “Do not believe everything you see on the TV”. Same can be said for the internet and radio if you are still into that.
Here is why I say that - People can say one thing especially if there is an incentive to do so like ad revenue which these sites get allot of.
My 2 cents
Why not, why should everything be 50-50? Do you realize how anti-men that sentence is?
Can you name any game companies that chose developers based on gender?
You can’t force or make men feel bad because you don’t see many women game developers, that’s their choice, most of the women don’t even like games and that’s not men’s fault. And there’s no reason to make it a big deal, there’s a reason we have different genders.
Many european companies put a (m), (f) or (m/f) specification on ALL of their job offers.
In my country on the other hand, you as employer can’t even ask a woman her age; or ask if she is married or how old are her family members or any other personal data for job interviews. And if you tell a woman that she can’t apply for a job position just because of gender your company proly is about to get sued lol…
I can’t see why ppl are so sensitive nowadays, when someone contact me over LinkedIn I give any personal information even if they don’t ask me to; have nothing to hide and see no issue providing as many information as possible.
Which led also for questioning why everybody use aliases / nicknames / dumb words as their ‘name’ online; it’s like everybody everywhere want to hide themselves while showing off a lot wasting time arguing opinions.
Look at Epic’s staff as a closer reference for instance; they all use their real name on this forum and there’s real important factors behind that. I mean, society is complicated and you’all afe missing the whole point while bringing to this forum discutions about sexism. I’d simply close this thread and have everybody moving on.
Sigh, yes I have “worked for any company yet”, in fact I have worked for large and small corporations in the US, Europe and Australia for over 20 years. You are way over simplifying a very complicated situation. The biggest problem is most sexual harassment is a he said/she said type situation, so as much as you’d like to think that HR can do something about it, often they don’t. You also have to remember, the HR department’s job is to protect the company, not the employees. If you honestly think just going to HR would solve all problems, I’m sorry to tell you that is not the case.
That statement was hardly “anti-men”, it was just pointing out that one gender has a vastly larger representation. I also haven’t seen anyone in this thread argue for 50/50 representation. All most sane, logical people are saying is that everyone should be judged on merit, not gender, race or sexual orientation. This isn’t that complicated.
Konami, and they admitted as much a few months ago. They admitted for years they were passing over qualified women for promotion, instead promoting less qualified men.
But here’s another example, and one that is fitting, and it even satisfies your crack about not everyone lives in the US. A male engineer in Australia named Kim O’Grady was looking for work, after four months of not getting interviews, he put “Mr.” on his resume and the next two jobs he applied to, he got interviews. Maybe he was lucky, maybe the stars just happened to align for him that day, but you know what they say about coincidences.
://whatwouldkingleonidasdo.tumblr/post/54989171152/how-i-discovered-gender-discrimination
Plenty of women like games, sure it might not be the 52% reported earlier in this thread, but it’s definitely higher than you seem to think it is.
Also “there’s a reason we have different genders”? What? I think you’re going a bit off the rails here.
Honestly, I think we have the full Backfire Effect happening here, so it’s probably not even worth continuing this conversation. I could link to a hundred more studies on this issue, and it would only cause those who disagree to strengthen their resolve which is kind of funny when you think about it given how logical programming and development is.
As said, though I am a moderator here, my opinion is not the opinion of anyone from Epic.
@:
If this pie chart of your blog and YouTube channel is correct:
I’d suggest that you change the content of your blog and YouTube channel to be more appealing to females.
Numbers are a funny thing 
Please note that I am not saying the Unreal community isn’t male dominated, I’m just saying your graph doesn’t prove a thing.
Personally, I think that the Unreal, Unity and CryEngine communities are all male dominated.
My reasoning is pretty straight forward - all three engines lend themselves well to games that attract male players.
@Andrew0: If we’re doing links about threats, discrimination based on gender etc, I have a few:
I could add plenty more but I hope you get the point.
There are serious problems in our first world countries, regarding discrimination against men, and there are very few people trying to improve it.
Saying “…professional industry is still dominated by males” just proves that your motives are to blame men for no reason.
I’m sorry but in the US the loser might be called the ‘last winner’, elsewhere he is the loser.
Yeah plenty women like games but compared to men that number is too small. In my life I hardly saw girls play video games, if I compare that number with the boys it would be less than 1%. That’s because men and women are naturally and biologically different in many aspects from each other, why is that hard for you to understand?
Have you noticed how it’s actually men who complain about this? It’s a bit awkward I know…
Never mind, case closed:
AndrewO - As I said, people love to be offended, especially when they have a financial incentive in it. It is now common to see “I am being harassed online help me. Also, here’s my Patreon / GoFundMe” on the internet. Especially given the fact that the radical left now believes that disagreement = harassment (This is even stated in Twitter’s TOS). You are blowing a marginal issue out of proportion based on “evidence” from professional victims.
What are you talking about? You quoted Moss, not me. I didn’t write anything about it. But even then, what is this “last winner” stuff, you need to read what it is you are writing.
Men and women are different biologically, I’d be shocked if anyone tried to argue otherwise, but that has nothing to do with this issue. Everything I have talked about is about women leaving the industry, not about not being interested. In fact, Stanford has over 50% women enrolled in first year computer science classes. So the pipeline into IT isn’t nearly as broken as people think, it’s getting women to stay. Please stay on point here.
Your “case closed” is that in another thread I said that in many games the female character model is smaller than the male character model? You can’t be serious.
Well, first off, I intentionally left GG out of the equation because it’s not worth bring up that hornet’s nest. I specifically said that it’s not only people involved in GG that get threatened. I did also link to an opinion piece by Wu, but in that piece she interviews other women in tech. GG’s and anti-GG’s were threatening and doxxing either other left, right and center.
But your other links don’t really apply and I’m surprised you’d go that route. The specifics of this thread was why aren’t there more game developers, and that is what I am discussing. Now that I live in the US, my state is very unfavorable towards men in divorces (alimony, child support, visitation rights, etc.), and it’s something that needs to be fixed and you will never hear me argue otherwise, but that has nothing to do with the issue that was brought up in the opening post. Same with cancer research numbers, or the fact that a small portion of the victims of domestic abuse are men…in that case specifically, I think anyone sane would argue that domestic violence against anyone is wrong. Men also get sexually harassed in the work place, and it shouldn’t happen either.
But the main discussion is, why aren’t there more women in gaming development. I extended it out to IT in general since gaming is just a small subset of that industry, and this is an industry I have worked in for over 20 years so I know it quite well. The numbers are there, women enter it, but many leave after just a few years due to what they describe as systemic sexism. Some of it is blatant harassment, other is more subtle in that they constantly get undermined or pass over for promotion. If it was just a small number, you could easily dismiss it as sour grapes, but it’s a very large number of women. If it was just a problem with women, you’d see the same problem in other industries, but there isn’t matching numbers, it’s very specific to IT and a few other industries (restaurant industry seems to be another one).
If you want to focus on the issue at hand and actually discuss that, that’s cool I’ll gladly keep discussing it.
DamirH, I’m not really sure what your point is here. So when Harvard performed the study where they asked women why they left the IT industry, how exactly were the people answering the questions playing professional victims? They had already left the industry, they weren’t getting money for the study, they weren’t getting compensation afterwards, in fact they were completely anonymous.
Was the LA Time fishing for clicks by posting the study? Maybe, but why would that matter when it comes to the studies referenced in the articles? Who exactly are the “professional victims” you keep speaking of in these cases? And if it is these women, why are there so many in the IT industry and not other industries?
Not entirely related to the topic of the thread, however, I saw mentioned about, if your harassed, go to HR and they will sort it out. Well, my own personal story:
I worked for a large sales corporation. A female employee of said corporation hated working in the department she was working in, and wanted to go to another department, where she would get paid a bit more, and not deal with the headaches of irate customers (ie: job promotion). The head boss of the store denied her request three different times, as they needed her in the dept. she was at (lack of employees).
At the time, we were, at the best, cordial, meaning that we would say hi to each other, and then continue on our workday. We worked in different departments, but they were right next to each other.
At one point, after she realized she couldn’t go to the other department, she contacted HR, and filed a complaint on me, telling them that I was harassing her, asking her out (she wasn’t even attractive to me, though I didn’t tell her that), and overall just being a, well, yea. So the GM calls me in, telling me that I had to sign paperwork and blah blah. Well, the right to face (or at least know) who your accuser is, right? Because no one has ever came up to me in all the years I have been working and asked me to stop doing something relating to this type of situation. This is the first thing that is mandatory, in all of the times that I have been going through HR related training. (tell them to stop, if they don’t, talk to the boss, if it continues, contact HR).
Anyways, I didn’t sign the paper work as I didn’t do anything wrong, and she got her promotion to the different department. So yea, being your typical white male in the workplace has it’s downside. You can become the stepping stone of people willing to do “what it takes”, and of course, being male, you’re guilty until proven innocent, and good luck with proving that since it’s heresy.
Now, back on topic… personally I’m not fond of discrimination at all. You should be hired on and get paid by what your worth… *** (gender), race, religion, hell, even species, none of that matters to me. If someone is better qualified at something than I am, then they should get it. It mean that I didn’t work hard enough for it.
Species? You got some more over here then are known here?
This is the most international community I ever attended.
I have had a number of female developers over the years in the NWN 1 era of online servers. Matter of fact I would like a couple for the current project. From my experience the female players and developers seem to be very interested in the type of games that have a lot of character options as well as being not so brutally competitive. I despise shooters for this reason…and so do most females. SWTOR and LoTRO (I should think WoW does as well) have quite a number of female players that I know and associate with. I believe we would certainly see many more female developers if the game style fit what they like.
As to my personal reference here is that a female artist/developer has a very unique attention to detail that males will just brush over. The end result is prettier and detailed art. I really like that…and it has always had a spot in my heart. If I could I would have a large team of females. 
@Olander:
This was my experience with WoW, at least way back in 2004-2006 when I played it.
Even me mum played it
@:
Yes, not related to the topic, but unfortunately not an uncommon thing.
Some people have no qualms about abusing systems designed to help prevent abuse to get ahead or limit others.
I chose to extend it to apply to all industries, since the IT industry is just a small subset of world wide industries and this is a world I have worked in for over 20 years so I know it quite well.
I was hoping to get the point across that it happens to everyone in different circumstances, industries etc - not just women in gaming/IT.
Instead of trying to shift focus to an issue beyond the original topic, lets get back on topic.
The topic was about the Unreal community and if women are interested in such technologies.
By such technologies, I assumed Unreal, Unity, CryEngine, Source etc.
My first post briefly talked about numbers being funny, then I addressed the topic:
I’m sure that if we were to look into stats regarding engines that lend themselves well to genres that are typically more interesting to female players, they would be less dominated by men.
I’m not saying that it should be 50-50, it was just what I have experienced, the number of males are greater nothing more. I’m not even saying that it is the to blame on all males. Society will balance by itself sooner or later if we are all tolerant enough to accept every human being.
So what is more important to the discussion (in my personal opinion) is that every body just has to make an effort on tolerance and I’m aware that most of us are already doing that effort in a natural way.
Again, my opinion is my own and does not represent Epic opinions 
