Poll: Is the ratio of women in the industry really a sign of sexism?

[Anathrax]

Thomas was alone is a racist game because the floor was black squares, meaning that you walk over black people.

I can find or make up many arguments about why X or Y is racist/sexist or whatever. Doesn't mean they are intelligent arguments or valid ones.

 

[RanD00M]

It's a sign that not as many women as men are interested in being part of the video game industry. Case closed.

 

[MetalMagpie]

All the way through childhood, girls are generally discouraged from "boy stuff" and encouraged to like "girl stuff", and as it happens, boy stuff consists of technical orientated toys, games and entertainment whilst girl stuff consists of magic, pink and haircare. The process is self-sustaining too - parents get kids the toys they would have got as a child, whilst girls and boys will want the toys they see their corresponding friends and siblings playing with.

Maybe I was just a spoilt child, but my siblings and I got the toys we asked for! When we went to the shops, my sister would whine to get a new Barbie doll and I would whine to get a new Lego set.

Up to about the age of six, I wore dungarees pretty much the whole time, because that's what my parents dressed me in and I didn't care very much about clothes. From the age of four, my sister was throwing tantrums if my mother tried to dress her in anything that wasn't pink. My sister wanted to be "girly". She liked dressing up as a princess and treating dolls like they were real babies. I wanted to be an inventor/scientist/explorer. I liked digging holes in the garden and constructing marble runs out of cardboard.

My sister is now a copywriter. I'm a software developer. We are evidence points A and B in my mother's theory that children are actually fully-formed human beings from the moment they enter this world (rather than being blank slates). Because, in her words, "I treated you both exactly the same, but you were still completely different people from before you could even talk".

 

[maninahat]

All the way through childhood, girls are generally discouraged from "boy stuff" and encouraged to like "girl stuff", and as it happens, boy stuff consists of technical orientated toys, games and entertainment whilst girl stuff consists of magic, pink and haircare. The process is self-sustaining too - parents get kids the toys they would have got as a child, whilst girls and boys will want the toys they see their corresponding friends and siblings playing with.

Maybe I was just a spoilt child, but my siblings and I got the toys we asked for! When we went to the shops, my sister would whine to get a new Barbie doll and I would whine to get a new Lego set.

Up to about the age of six, I wore dungarees pretty much the whole time, because that's what my parents dressed me in and I didn't care very much about clothes. From the age of four, my sister was throwing tantrums if my mother tried to dress her in anything that wasn't pink. My sister wanted to be "girly". She liked dressing up as a princess and treating dolls like they were real babies. I wanted to be an inventor/scientist/explorer. I liked digging holes in the garden and constructing marble runs out of cardboard.

My sister is now a copywriter. I'm a software developer. We are evidence points A and B in my mother's theory that children are actually fully-formed human beings from the moment they enter this world (rather than being blank slates). Because, in her words, "I treated you both exactly the same, but you were still completely different people from before you could even talk".

Would you support the notion then that girls, as "fully-formed human beings", are biologically more predisposed to like pink stuff? You're an exception to this of course, and everyone is individual in their tastes, but I'm sure you are aware that generally "girly" things are pink and girls tend to get pink things.

I ask because pink wasn't always a girly colour. Pink used to be a boy's colour and blue was for girl's. It changed sometime in the beginning of the 20th Century, but before then, blue was strictly a girly thing. I don't rule genetics out, but if biological predispositions factored significantly into an entire sex's tastes and attitudes, then a change in colour fashions should hardly stop most girls from buying a bunch of blue crap.

 

[Tufty94]

In my games design course there are about 15 boys in my class and only 2 girls. It's not sexism, it's just the games industry seems to attract more attention from males. In fact, my tutor told me that girls are more likely to get a position in the games industry than boys are.

 

[MetalMagpie]

All the way through childhood, girls are generally discouraged from "boy stuff" and encouraged to like "girl stuff", and as it happens, boy stuff consists of technical orientated toys, games and entertainment whilst girl stuff consists of magic, pink and haircare. The process is self-sustaining too - parents get kids the toys they would have got as a child, whilst girls and boys will want the toys they see their corresponding friends and siblings playing with.

Maybe I was just a spoilt child, but my siblings and I got the toys we asked for! When we went to the shops, my sister would whine to get a new Barbie doll and I would whine to get a new Lego set.

Up to about the age of six, I wore dungarees pretty much the whole time, because that's what my parents dressed me in and I didn't care very much about clothes. From the age of four, my sister was throwing tantrums if my mother tried to dress her in anything that wasn't pink. My sister wanted to be "girly". She liked dressing up as a princess and treating dolls like they were real babies. I wanted to be an inventor/scientist/explorer. I liked digging holes in the garden and constructing marble runs out of cardboard.

My sister is now a copywriter. I'm a software developer. We are evidence points A and B in my mother's theory that children are actually fully-formed human beings from the moment they enter this world (rather than being blank slates). Because, in her words, "I treated you both exactly the same, but you were still completely different people from before you could even talk".

That doesn't mean there wasn't societal influence put upon you. Look at advertisements, television shows, your peers at the time. Why did your sister consider pink to be "girly", as you said? Would she have wanted to be an inventor or a scientist as you did if she had understood those to be "girly" as well? And if they were, would you?
Your parents may have treated you the same, but our culture very much stratifies the genders, either consciously or unconsciously, and that has a very large impact on us as children.

We're our own people, certainly, but to say that our environment, and those that inhabit it, have no influence on us is ignoring a great deal of facts.

So why did my sister choose to like "girly" stuff and I didn't? We were both girls growing up only two years apart, watching the same TV programs and adverts (due to there only being one TV in the house which could only be watched during certain times). We saw the same billboards on the way to school, and were taught by the same teachers. Why did my sister get excited by adverts for dolls, while I got excited by adverts for Lego?

We were the same gender, in the same environment, but we grew up with completely contrasting tastes and interests.

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

It is a sign of societal sexism, not mere industry sexism. Sexism is a societal construct and almost entirely self-conscious, something that has to be unlearned as apposed to not taught. Sexism is when a girl looks at her options and decides, hey, I want to make games, but I should get a job in retail, because girls aren't meant to make games. That's something societal, as apposed to the industry poking her in the face saying YOU NO GET JOB HERE.

 

[Kinitawowi]

Trouble is, I don't think that any forced, top-down change would be effective. I think the best answer for female gamers is to keep plugging away, keep playing games, keep reaching out to other women outside gaming culture who show a spark of interest, and not to allow themselves to get completely hardened to those aspects of gaming culture to the point where they're part of what makes other women feel excluded.

She's a smart woman.

Quotas and ratios are not attempts to solve the problem, they're attempts to make it look like they're trying to solve the problem while actually exacerbating it. Right now there's a lot more men in the industry than there are women. Imposing a rule that says they've got to take on a certain number of women means picking people based entirely on their gender, which is exactly what they're trying to avoid.

 

[Quadocky]

A good question to ask is since women are apparently not interested in making video games, why are men interested in making video games?

 

[Dryk]

You won't be able to convince me that that article isn't a complete load of shit until I can find a list of everyone who was on stage at that conference and what their position in the company they were representing is.

 

[Bara_no_Hime]

So at the Sony Playstation4 showing there was an uproar in hate email after words, over the fact that there were no women presenters...

I think you may be missing the point. The issue isn't that no women work at Sony or that the divide isn't an exact 50/50 split. Tons of women work at Sony for one thing, and for another a 50/50 split is unlikely to occur for various other reasons.

What people are upset about is that none of the faces of Sony are female.

Sony chose nothing but men to represent itself. The women who work for Sony weren't asked to come present it's work.

That is the issue as I see it - that Sony is choosing to ignore women and focus only on men.

Alternatively, the issue could be that no women have been promoted high enough in the company to act as presenters. That could show workplace sexism because it is unlikely that only men would have the skills necessary for promotion (and thus the most reasonable explanation is sexist practices in promotion selection).

Remember also that Sony is a Japanese company, and Japan still has MANY issues with sexist hiring and promotion practices. Hiring a woman to be a secretary to the male employees may result in a 50/50 split in total employees, but if all the women are secretaries and all the men are programmers, then that's still sexist. And that sort of thing happens WAY more in Japan than it does here in the US because we have laws protecting against it.

But it does still happen here. Much of it is grandfathered in (pun intended) due to hiring practices 50 years ago resulting in all white-male executive boards now (because, even if hired now, a female employee can't catch up on that many years of experience and seniority until another 50 years have passed).

Anyway, the point is, I think you may be misunderstanding the complaint. Your poll certainly seems to be missing the point.

 

[MetalMagpie]

All the way through childhood, girls are generally discouraged from "boy stuff" and encouraged to like "girl stuff", and as it happens, boy stuff consists of technical orientated toys, games and entertainment whilst girl stuff consists of magic, pink and haircare. The process is self-sustaining too - parents get kids the toys they would have got as a child, whilst girls and boys will want the toys they see their corresponding friends and siblings playing with.

Maybe I was just a spoilt child, but my siblings and I got the toys we asked for! When we went to the shops, my sister would whine to get a new Barbie doll and I would whine to get a new Lego set.

Up to about the age of six, I wore dungarees pretty much the whole time, because that's what my parents dressed me in and I didn't care very much about clothes. From the age of four, my sister was throwing tantrums if my mother tried to dress her in anything that wasn't pink. My sister wanted to be "girly". She liked dressing up as a princess and treating dolls like they were real babies. I wanted to be an inventor/scientist/explorer. I liked digging holes in the garden and constructing marble runs out of cardboard.

My sister is now a copywriter. I'm a software developer. We are evidence points A and B in my mother's theory that children are actually fully-formed human beings from the moment they enter this world (rather than being blank slates). Because, in her words, "I treated you both exactly the same, but you were still completely different people from before you could even talk".

Would you support the notion then that girls, as "fully-formed human beings", are biologically more predisposed to like pink stuff? You're an exception to this of course, and everyone is individual in their tastes, but I'm sure you are aware that generally "girly" things are pink and girls tend to get pink things.

I ask because pink wasn't always a girly colour. Pink used to be a boy's colour and blue was for girl's. It changed sometime in the beginning of the 20th Century, but before then, blue was strictly a girly thing. I don't rule genetics out, but if biological predispositions factored significantly into an entire sex's tastes and attitudes, then a change in colour fashions should hardly stop most girls from buying a bunch of blue crap.

I'm aware of the fact that pink (being a lighter version of red, a very masculine colour) used to be used for boys, and blue for girls. It isn't about colour, so much as what colour is attached to. Everything my sister loved (dolls, princess outfits, etc.) came in pink, so she wanted to wear pink. My toys didn't come in any particular colour, so I didn't especially care. Our difference in clothing is symbolic of our differences in more important things.

When we were both in primary school (four to six years old) my sister spent all her time socialising with other children, dressing up and playing make-believe games (you're the baby and I'm the mummy, etc.) while I spent all my time painting and drawing. My mother observed that from a very early age my sister was motivated by activities that improved her social skills, while I was motivated by activities I could do quietly on my own.

It has been noticed before that there is a difference in the importance placed on social skills between the genders. On average, girls talk earlier (and more!) than boys and develop verbal skills faster. At the start of primary school, the average girl has verbal skills about two months ahead of the average boy. By the time they leave primary school, the gap in reading and writing level between the genders is about a year.

There is evidence that - again, on average - girls have a greater "emotional intelligence" than boys. (This is one of the possible explanations as to why men suffer from depression more often than women.) The average woman finds it easier to understand how another person is feeling (and what the reasons for those feelings might be) than the average man does. I am certainly not typical of my gender in this regard, and frequently wonder if my sister can somehow read my mind!

All of this seems to point to more girls (and women) being motivated to pursue paths in life that make a greater use of their social and verbal skills. Whilst more boys and men focus more strongly on technical skills. Dolls are social toys - they're used for acting out social situations (hence why young children often talk out loud whilst playing with them). Lego is a solitary toy.

Anyway, in conclusion:
a) Psychology and child development are wonderfully interesting topics.
b) I really need to spend less time reading books and more time out actually doing stuff!

 

[MetalMagpie]

All the way through childhood, girls are generally discouraged from "boy stuff" and encouraged to like "girl stuff", and as it happens, boy stuff consists of technical orientated toys, games and entertainment whilst girl stuff consists of magic, pink and haircare. The process is self-sustaining too - parents get kids the toys they would have got as a child, whilst girls and boys will want the toys they see their corresponding friends and siblings playing with.

Maybe I was just a spoilt child, but my siblings and I got the toys we asked for! When we went to the shops, my sister would whine to get a new Barbie doll and I would whine to get a new Lego set.

Up to about the age of six, I wore dungarees pretty much the whole time, because that's what my parents dressed me in and I didn't care very much about clothes. From the age of four, my sister was throwing tantrums if my mother tried to dress her in anything that wasn't pink. My sister wanted to be "girly". She liked dressing up as a princess and treating dolls like they were real babies. I wanted to be an inventor/scientist/explorer. I liked digging holes in the garden and constructing marble runs out of cardboard.

My sister is now a copywriter. I'm a software developer. We are evidence points A and B in my mother's theory that children are actually fully-formed human beings from the moment they enter this world (rather than being blank slates). Because, in her words, "I treated you both exactly the same, but you were still completely different people from before you could even talk".

That doesn't mean there wasn't societal influence put upon you. Look at advertisements, television shows, your peers at the time. Why did your sister consider pink to be "girly", as you said? Would she have wanted to be an inventor or a scientist as you did if she had understood those to be "girly" as well? And if they were, would you?
Your parents may have treated you the same, but our culture very much stratifies the genders, either consciously or unconsciously, and that has a very large impact on us as children.

We're our own people, certainly, but to say that our environment, and those that inhabit it, have no influence on us is ignoring a great deal of facts.

So why did my sister choose to like "girly" stuff and I didn't? We were both girls growing up only two years apart, watching the same TV programs and adverts (due to there only being one TV in the house which could only be watched during certain times). We saw the same billboards on the way to school, and were taught by the same teachers. Why did my sister get excited by adverts for dolls, while I got excited by adverts for Lego?

We were the same gender, in the same environment, but we grew up with completely contrasting tastes and interests.

Like I said, it's an influence. It doesn't define who you are but it does have an impact. Did your sister like the girly things because they were seen to be girly, and she felt the need to conform to her gender? Did you feel the need to rebel against gender norms? Did she have female friends that she felt would accept her more if she were more traditionally female? Did you have friends that liked legos more than dolls? There are a myriad different reasons, many that we aren't even aware of, but they do exist.

EDIT: For example, I'm a Criminology major and when I was very young, I would sit with my grandmother and watch detective shows with her. It was a ritual for us, and we always liked to do it. It's of course not the sole reason I chose my field (There are many), but I can't ignore the potential influence of viewing Hercule Poirot and Law and Order when I was five.

I'm not really sure a four-year-old child is aware of gender norms (or the idea of rebelling against them). All I remember from my mindset at that time was that building stuff was fun and dolls were boring! Similarly, two-to-four-year-olds don't really pick their friends. My and my sister's friends as young children were just the children of my parent's friends. Perhaps interestingly, my sister has stayed friends with many of those people even as an adult, whilst I've entirely lost touch with them.

Watching detective shows probably helped to plant the idea of Criminology in your mind something to study, but - as you said - you had other reasons for picking it as a degree. Law and Order must have tens of thousands of hard-core fans (and hundred of thousands of regular viewers) most of which haven't ended up doing Criminology degrees.

In contrast, there wasn't a computer in my house until I was ten, and my access to it was restricted to half an hour a day until I was thirteen. Computer games that weren't "educational" were banned completely for many years, which meant the first console I ever owned was the PS2. Even after that, games with guns in were still banned up until the point I left home. Despite all that discouragement, I'm now both a software developer and a gaming addict!

For the record, I was always been a "good-two-shoes" child, never a rebel (even as a teenager!) so I placidly obeyed my parents on all their anti-computer rules, until I left home.

I'm not disputing that environment has an influence on children. I just don't believe that ensuring girls and boys are treated identically from the moment they are born would have more than a tiny effect on the numbers of women in technical careers (or the numbers of men in nursing, for that matter).

 

[Yopaz]

Let's look at the facts.

Male and female brain development is different. The result is that we work differently.

We end up taking different career paths based on physiological differences, we end up doing different things in the same career. I guess this is part of why it is important to have both working the same jobs. Different choices lead to different results. Should we force a 50/50 split? No, I don't think so. We could encourage girls to get into the game industry, but I doubt it would matter that much.

By pressuring girls into jobs they don't want we are doing something wrong. If we give a woman a job even though she's less qualified to do it than a guy because we need another female we're doing something wrong. Equality means we should be allowed to choose. Equality means we should be judged for our work, not our genitals or skin tone.

Now keeping a balance between males and females is more important for teachers, doctors, nurses and psychologists is something I can see as important.

 

[Chemical Alia]

All the way through childhood, girls are generally discouraged from "boy stuff" and encouraged to like "girl stuff", and as it happens, boy stuff consists of technical orientated toys, games and entertainment whilst girl stuff consists of magic, pink and haircare. The process is self-sustaining too - parents get kids the toys they would have got as a child, whilst girls and boys will want the toys they see their corresponding friends and siblings playing with.

Maybe I was just a spoilt child, but my siblings and I got the toys we asked for! When we went to the shops, my sister would whine to get a new Barbie doll and I would whine to get a new Lego set.

Up to about the age of six, I wore dungarees pretty much the whole time, because that's what my parents dressed me in and I didn't care very much about clothes. From the age of four, my sister was throwing tantrums if my mother tried to dress her in anything that wasn't pink. My sister wanted to be "girly". She liked dressing up as a princess and treating dolls like they were real babies. I wanted to be an inventor/scientist/explorer. I liked digging holes in the garden and constructing marble runs out of cardboard.

My sister is now a copywriter. I'm a software developer. We are evidence points A and B in my mother's theory that children are actually fully-formed human beings from the moment they enter this world (rather than being blank slates). Because, in her words, "I treated you both exactly the same, but you were still completely different people from before you could even talk".

When I was a kid, I hated everything girly. Hated pink, hated Barbie, flowers, dresses, New Kids on the Block, didn't play with dolls, any of that. All my relatives knew I liked drawing, animals, dinosaurs, learning about science and overall pretty gender-neutral stuff. Yet every birthday, I was always dismayed to open present after present of troll dolls and girl toys I would never want to play with, and it was only the hope for that occasional video game from my mom and dad (who hated me playing video games) that would make me happy. I guess that my aunts and uncles just went with the "default girl gifts" because they had better things to think about than what I might really like, what with their busy adult lives, but I guess that's kind of the problem.

I mean, it's cool that you guys always got the toys you wanted, and I have no problem with girls liking dolls or anything like that. But there's a real pressure that steers girls towards girl shit that is pretty hard to avoid, even when as a kid you desperately tried to.

 

[AVeryClassyCat]

Is it a sign of sexism in a particular industry? Not sure, that really depends on the perspective of women who do work in that industry.

Is it a product of sexist attitudes that discourage girls from tech/math-centered career paths? Probably.

 

[Frybird]

Sony chose nothing but men to represent itself. The women who work for Sony weren't asked to come present it's work.

That is the issue as I see it - that Sony is choosing to ignore women and focus only on men.

But that is an assumption....

..it might be true, it might not be.

The thing as you see it isn't fact. And in my perspective, not very probable.

Let's look at who presented:

Mark Cerny - Lead PS4 Architect and Game Designer on Knack.
Dave Perry - CEO of Gaikai
Michael Denny - Vice President of Sony Worldwide Studios Europe
Andrew House - CEO of Sony Computer Entertainment Europe

They were not merely presenters, but at the very head of the development of the PS4. They clearly weren't chosen by gender, and not mainly chosen for being good presenters, but because they are actually responsible for the things revealed about the PS4.

And no, i won't count the game presentations because you personally hold SONY accountable for "not choosing women". It would be imo a pretty long stretch to assume them saying to Bungie or Capcom "NO GIRLS! BOYS ONLY!"

Again, why do they NEED to have a woman on stage? It's about the product, and if they had a woman on stage, it wouldn't have changed anything about the presentation itself, because she would've talked about the product. The only difference would have been that she wouldn't have been the CEO or lead architect on anything PS4.

You pretend like Sony deliberately prevented to show any woman at the show, even though there is no reason for Sony to do it, and there is no hint that any gender, male or female, played a role at the presentation, based on the people who were there.


I am NOT assuming that there ISN'T ANY Sexism on any branch of Sony ever, or that Sexism in general is some illusion we need to ignore.
But the PS4 Reveal IS. NOT. the place where this matters. And dragging this topic kicking and screaming into it just hurts the greater issue.

 

[Fluffythepoo]

Women do literary arts, men do visual arts
Or women do biology, men do physics

thus it was written, thus it shall be