Marginalized, Excluded and Harassed: The “Problem” of Women in the Games Industry
In this talk, I’ll review the ‘problem’ of women in a male dominated games industry, with a view to demonstrating the larger structural and cultural issues in play that successfully work to marginalize, harass and exclude women and others from this highly lucrative technology industry. The talk will review recent harassment campaigns that primarily attacked female game developers and critics, and overview some of the work that has been going on in public and private to resist those campaigns. Next I’ll describe several specific trajectories of research coming out of an international, Canadian funded partnership program called “Re-Figuring Innovation in Games” that is working to study and document the ‘deep structures’ of gender inequality in games industry and games culture that shape and define the “problems” of—and for– women in games. The talk will conclude by identifying key design features for interventions that effectively interrupt and reconfigure persisting patterns of gendered inequality and under-representation.
Comments are closed.