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Bonnie Ross of 343 Industries Wants To Close Gender Gap In Game Development
- Thread starter Cranster
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OP
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They beat you to it unfortunately.
Alot of the replies are embarrassing.
I watched that when it aired last night and was like "OMG THAT'S BONNIE ROSS", she's awesome.
Not very long, those replies to the tweet are abhorrent.
Not very long, those replies to the tweet are abhorrent.
disgraceful, they make it sound like she said we didn't want male developers to do well. All she said was that women devs are declining even though plenty of positions are there and something should be done.
There's more incentives/help for women to get into computer science than ever before. I understand not necessarily wanting to get into game development due to the uniquely toxic environment. But they also aren't getting into the CS fields in general. Which is concerning and I'd love to know why. Media plays a part. But the nerdy computer scientists has never exactly been a strong pulling force, at least for me.
There's so many posited theories and anecdotal experiences. But I rarely see a comprehensive study if anyone has one.
There's so many posited theories and anecdotal experiences. But I rarely see a comprehensive study if anyone has one.
Some dumpsterfire opinions there, but plenty of good comments too.
She's not wrong. I'm ALWAYS trying to find and hire women for any and all engineering and art positions, and there are so few. And while women in the gaming industry, if publicly known or out in the world of social media, have to suffer significant harassment, they're extremely heavily recruited and it's difficult for a smaller developer like me to compete.
It's a long-term problem with no immediate fix. I try and get involved in local events in the community for young people/teens, but it's rare and I don't feel like I can make much of an impact like that.
It's a long-term problem with no immediate fix. I try and get involved in local events in the community for young people/teens, but it's rare and I don't feel like I can make much of an impact like that.
OP
OP
I made a couple comments myself, one of them calling out the negativity.
I'm sure countless have been chased out. I've seen some of the shit that women game devs share on Twitter that they get on a daily basis and it's heart-breaking. I can't imagine dealing with that on a daily basis, even if you love your job.
fixed that for you. this isnt exclusive, or even particularly nasty with this individual community
This is probably true of the gaming community as a whole. Lot of rotten eggs out there unfortunately.
Some of us think diversity of thought and experience make for a stronger, more well-rounded team, and that *makes* them a better candidate.
Pretty much how it was when I was working for Clorox Bleach as a chemical engineer. They were looking for women for the field to diversify the workforce but they kept coming up short because it was a very limited pool in the school In Maryland. A large portion of the women went to Pharmaceutical science or went straight into Nursing Programs or trying to become doctors. There is alot of competition for the small group who go for the other sciences.
...and that did not take long.
I fully understand how that may sound like a fair reply, but it's an answer that is far too simple for such a complex problem and makes it so fucking frustrating to hear. And honestly, do you really think that is some magical insight that these people who have experience making games for years and years haven't considered?
But to at least touch on the subject. That reply does not account for some very basic things when it comes to hiring and building high-performance teams capable of pulling some nigh-impossible ordeals (aka ship games):
- bias of recruting people, because there is no such thing as objective skill/talent that is foolproof to measure, nor is it easy or standardized or account for the fact that career and roles in game development are anything but stationary
- when it comes to building teams of 150+, team-fit and culture are extremely important you absolutely should not hire for just "skill/talent" (which in any case are oversimplificating the person's potential output and results in ways that do not reflect the reality of working in games) as skill and experience is often easier and faster to teach than cultural fit
- good culture has a clear correlation between results, and there's quite amount of studies showing that having gender representation can contribute to these results
- women make up for a hefty part of the audience, and having that voice unrepresented in the team can be quite bad (especially so if your particular game might otherwise resonate with that audience)
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I think one possible shorter term solution would be to move away from looking at a purely traditional educational entry requirement (having to have a degree) and to a more vocational educational entry requirements (apprenticeships for lack of better terms). Try and attract the people before they enter higher education as by then they have already begun limiting their variety of employment focus. I believe this would be a way to tackle all kinds of diversity issues when it comes to recruitment.
From what she's saying, it seems a lot of women aren't very interested in game development on the whole compared to men, which is not surprising at all.
Gaming is getting more diverse as time goes on though. Give it another decade or so before we really start to see more diversity. That statement is based on absolutely nothing
Gaming is getting more diverse as time goes on though. Give it another decade or so before we really start to see more diversity. That statement is based on absolutely nothing
More women developers would be awesome. Anecdotally though the majority of the talented women developers (not game developers, not in that field) I've met actively tried to get out of it and move more into more managerial roles. I don't know how much of that is the environment or the work itself.
Some anecdotal story:
As a woman that considered studying mathematics after taking higher mathematics classes in high school (had the top exam) as well as programming classes, it wasn't for me personally in the end, but part of it is also my comfort level. I wasn't a very good looking girl, so I mostly didn't get along with boys in school. The programming class was all boys. I was invisible to them, and had no previous knowledge. Sometimes someone would ask aloud for help, and any time I would offer to explain something, they would turn around and ask one of their male friends instead. I taught myself mostly, but the teacher was nice, and at least I felt that he tried to encourage me in my efforts, so I'm not trying to paint this as if I was actively pushed out.
But I wasn't comfortable in that surrounding, it made me constantly question my abilities. It wasn't fun to learn like that.
When people say that you aren't hired for your gender but your ability: There's a confidence and perceived ability in tech knowledge that is extremely hard to achieve for women under the current conditions. You have to want it thrice as much - accordingly, only 30% as many girls end up in those positions, even though many more are qualified or interested. There's just so many more rocks to climb, hurdles to jump, and inner growth to achieve to get there.
Once you get accepted into an office where your experience is valued and your abilities aren't questioned, I think it's also less likely that you want to change, further your career, grow out of your position. You have possibly experienced enough shitty offices, so you just straight up decline other job offers once you're in a place and position you like. You've probably heard enough shit from people that judge you prematurely, that you don't want to go through new team over new team to make a name for yourself.
As a woman that considered studying mathematics after taking higher mathematics classes in high school (had the top exam) as well as programming classes, it wasn't for me personally in the end, but part of it is also my comfort level. I wasn't a very good looking girl, so I mostly didn't get along with boys in school. The programming class was all boys. I was invisible to them, and had no previous knowledge. Sometimes someone would ask aloud for help, and any time I would offer to explain something, they would turn around and ask one of their male friends instead. I taught myself mostly, but the teacher was nice, and at least I felt that he tried to encourage me in my efforts, so I'm not trying to paint this as if I was actively pushed out.
But I wasn't comfortable in that surrounding, it made me constantly question my abilities. It wasn't fun to learn like that.
When people say that you aren't hired for your gender but your ability: There's a confidence and perceived ability in tech knowledge that is extremely hard to achieve for women under the current conditions. You have to want it thrice as much - accordingly, only 30% as many girls end up in those positions, even though many more are qualified or interested. There's just so many more rocks to climb, hurdles to jump, and inner growth to achieve to get there.
Once you get accepted into an office where your experience is valued and your abilities aren't questioned, I think it's also less likely that you want to change, further your career, grow out of your position. You have possibly experienced enough shitty offices, so you just straight up decline other job offers once you're in a place and position you like. You've probably heard enough shit from people that judge you prematurely, that you don't want to go through new team over new team to make a name for yourself.
I hire employees based on skills/talent, that much is true.
However, I also aim to have a diverse team of employees in every sense of the term, as it means a broader range of thoughts, opinions, and perspectives that gives me a better product offering as a whole. There is more to the hiring process than just talent.
Absolutely this. I'm always on the lookout to add diversity and talent to my team (in a field tangential to gaming but not directly related) and the hardest part is even just getting a diverse pool of applicants.
I'll never make it a staple of the posting or the point of my hiring process, but it's something I'd like to see and very rarely get many results in. Unfortunately, when I do, those employees often don't fit the role as well as we'd like, making it even harder.
True but a lot of talented woman are passed on for jobs based on their gender. What I would like to see is blacks being hired more in the game industry.
Part of the issue I take with perspectives like his is also that people also aren't just a stat checklist, the real world isn't an RPG where on your resume they see you're a 10 in coding where the other person is a 9 and so they go with you over them. People like to reduce it to saying "well you take the better person for the job" but how do you do that? It's not nearly as simple as they make it sound.
You interview a person and try to get a feel for the person's strengths, weaknesses and experience through that. What can that person bring to the team? Any given applicant might not be a superstar coder, but chances are if you're applying at a place like Microsoft you're going to be more than competent at your job. Hell, someone might seem brilliant and on paper be an amazing hire, but in the interview not seem like a good culture fit, even though that person would be "the best for the job". Like take a hypothetical situation where one of the guys you're interviewing has more experience than the woman you're interviewing, but the team you're interviewing for is all men. In that case introducing some diversity to the team would, imo, provide way more benefit than adding another guy who has a bit more experience.
Hiring is complicated and you're building a team of people, not putting together stat sheets. That's where the diversity is important, because diversity of people and thought leads to better results. Different perspectives and ways of thinking can bounce off each other and lead to really cool things.
Absolutely.
Sad part is, I definitely said stuff like that when I was like eighteen and edgy and read Maddox. I try to be somewhat tolerant of it, since society isn't set up to help men empathize with women, but it can still be frustrating to hear, I'm sure.
I was listening to Mozilla's IRL podcast yesterday and one of the people they interviewed had a goal of 50% of the people in compsci being women by 2020. This organization was founded in the mid 90's and back then it was 35%, today it is 25%.
ironic sense women use to program the first computers because typing was women's work
Yeah. It's really unfortunate.
Apparently the contribution of women programmers were so buried at one point that a picture of some of the first women programmers were thought to be the 1920's equivalent of booth babes because there was almost no record of them working on some of the first computers.
The podcast I mention in my previous post did mention that open source software tends to be better for female representation in tech, which hopefully is a good sign.
More women in directorial and creative roles would be nice, I definitely think we need more women on writing staffs.
For stuff like programming and level design I'd want the most experienced people with the best ideas for the project, doesn't matter what they are.
For stuff like programming and level design I'd want the most experienced people with the best ideas for the project, doesn't matter what they are.
I mean then we are back to the chicken and the egg. How do you get more experience if you can't even get in the room?
I was a director of engineering for about 8 years (not in the games industry), and I always tried to bring diversity of sex, race, and background to the team. It is quite difficult to do given the relatively small pool of candidates in the underrepresented areas. I will say that having this diversity leads to teams that are much less myopic about their work and in general seemed to create better teams.
I applaud the idea of getting more women interested in programming. It will make the industry a better place. The backlash is to be expected given how ignorant people can be.
I applaud the idea of getting more women interested in programming. It will make the industry a better place. The backlash is to be expected given how ignorant people can be.
Is that the issue, though? Ross seems to be saying that women in the field have any number of job offers. They're not getting turned down in favor of "better" male candidates.
Internships, entry level positions, indie games. One would hope developers are trying to be fair in who they give opportunities to. It sounded like they just weren't getting enough female applicants.
Thanks for being willing to try and help the problem though, man. I know it's a hell of a challenge, especially with the culture that surrounds gaming.
It's one head of a many headed hydra. And it starts early, little girls are told certain things are off limits, that disheartens them and steers them to other things. Those who get past that find there are limited spots and they get passed over because guys got a leg up and encouragement in the field starting back in elementary school. They got the experience and sometimes connections and networking so they become "the right one for the job" by virtue of mail privilege
We've had a system of apparently promoting people "for their skills / talents" for many years, and now there are more men called John leading the FTSE 100 than there are women.
You don't think that suggests women aren't being given a fair crack of the whip, regardless of their ability?
Unless you think that men called John somehow innately possess a talent the rest of us don't, I find it extremely unlikely that they're more talented than 50% of the human population. Enforcing diversity across an organisation pushes us in a direction where people 'can' be judged purely on their own merits.
Edit: I'm a software dev for a living - I know so many women who would be absolutely great at it, but would never consider it as the idea it's 'not for them' is always pushed. It's a huge shame.
Lack of diversity in a team can lead to an exlusionary club atmosphere that would alienate highly skilled people of different sex and ethnicities. So it certainly is something that should be taken into account. Lower skilled minorities and women getting hired at companies that practice affirmative action seems exceedingly rare. Tends to be the other way around from my observations.
The fact is, these ideal Libertarian meritocracies don't exist, and are practically impossible to implement.