This is a young industry filled with young employees; and to top it off, it’s an industry that is all about play. So a large percentage of the employees are boisterous and unused to suit-and-tie formality. The result is a tee-shirt-and-jeans dress code, toys in the cubicles, nerf battles, after-work game sprees, over-the-top Halloween decorations, witty banter, trash-talk, and sometimes, topics of conversation that might get you a stern warning if you worked in an uptight environment. Sometimes it feels a bit like the Wild West. But, to balance that, from what I have seen, the folks in this industry know how to toggle in an instant from fun to serious. The work has got to get done, and it can’t be left in a shoddy state on account that the team was having a rubber-band battle.
This is not to say that there aren’t existing, measurable inequalities in the games industry. Game developer Magazine’s April 2006 Fifth Annual Salary Survey puts the percentage of women in the games industry at ten percent, which is up from seven percent two years ago. I suspect that the percentage is still so low because teen girls are not likely to consider making games as a potential career. Consider this: in 1950 a device called Simon was built. A fact sheet about this device said “Simon may start a fad of building baby mechanical brains, similar to the hobby of building crystal radio sets that swept the country in the 1920's." Sure enough, what followed was a few decades in which men, who, already having hobbies of tinkering with radios and cars and erector sets, took up computer-building for amusement. It’s no surprise that since the men got to the computers first, they also got to the games first, both in the making and the playing. And since neither young women nor young men are generally inclined to take up hobbies that they see as being the territory of the opposite sex, to this day the hobby of game-playing and the industry of game-making are only slowly being infiltrated by us girls.
There remains, too, a discrepancy between the average salaries that males and females make. According to that same Game Developer article, the average salary for males in the games industry is $74,518, while the average for females is $69,704. While some people are going to look at that number and see unfair things going on, to me it looks like the result of women simply not yet having a sizable and extended presence here. At least thirty percent of the women in the industry currently have less than two years’ experience. Their entry-level salaries bring down the average. When the percentage of women closes in on the percentage of men, and the number of women with several years of experience has had time to grow, then the salary difference will also vanish.
To those of you who are young enough that you have not yet chosen a career, I hope that you will never fail to seriously consider a career simply because it seems like the other sex got there first. Girls, you don’t have to be a tomboy to make games. Being comfortable in an industry made up mostly of the opposite sex can be achieved by assertiveness and by being comfortable with who you are. You have the potential to thrive here. Come on in, the industry is fine.
Info on Simon:
http://www.blinkenlights.com/pc.shtml
http://www.blinkenlights.com/classiccmp/berkeley/simonfaq.html
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