Gaming Industry: Please Wait…Gender Balance Loading
Women make up almost half (46%) of gamers, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the people running the game. Our 2020 Global Gaming Gender Balance Scorecard sends a warning signal.
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Women make up almost half (46%) of gamers, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the people running the game. Our 2020 Global Gaming Gender Balance Scorecard sends a warning signal.
Gaming is one of the sectors buoyed by global COVID-19 lockdowns. It’s heading towards US$160 billion in sales this year, and becoming a huge, if rather unrecognised, influencer of culture. Predicted revenues far outstrip the historical references of what’s popular, like music or movies. So this sector’s attitudes to gender is having, and will increasingly have, an outsize impact on our future. If you were worried that lockdown was launching us back to 1950s gender roles, you may want to check out what a couple of billion (yup, you read that right) people are playing now.
Male Character - Selected: The astonishingly stereotypical depiction of sexy women and hunky men seems the sectoral norm. No wonder perhaps, since our Scorecard shows a pretty consistent picture of heavily male-dominated Executive Teams industry-wide. Of 144 executives in the Top 14 companies, 121 are men and only 23 are women. So women make up only 16% of Executive Teams, significantly below the average female representation for the industry as a whole. Despite what The Economist describes as President Xi Jinping’s “crackdown on online addiction, blood, butchery, boobs and bums (there are rules for how much skin a female avatar can show),” the gendered nature of the gaming world will have an impact in the huge Chinese market and globally. Just as movies have started to become more gender balanced, games are replacing them as culture-setting dominators.
The Women in Games Global Conferencecoming up September 7-13 will zoom in on the gender balance (or lack thereof) of the gaming industry. Despite efforts by Women in Gamesand other organizations advocating for gender equity in the industry, vast imbalances remain the norm. Only 24% of those working in the industry are women, an unusually low figure compared to other creative and cultural sectors. For Marie-Claire Isaaman, CEO of Women in Games, the objective of the virtual conference is “enabling us to sustain and continue our mission to realise a games industry, culture and community free of gender discrimination for all females to achieve their full potential. And, through achieving this equity and parity, empowering the games industry and community to be more creative and innovative, productive and profitable.”
A Winning Score: Bucking the trend of male-domination, Google stands out as the only company on our Scorecard to achieve our Balanced ranking, with an Executive Team ratio of 41/59 female to male. At least proving balance is achievable in the sector. Warner Bros. Entertainment is the only company in the Top 14 to have a female CEO, Ann Sarnoff, with four women on her Executive Team of nine. However, these two companies’ gaming operations represent only a tiny share of their overall business and revenue streams. So their gender balance isn’t likely to impact the sector as a whole.
Eastern Lag? Asian companies on our scorecard are by far the most male dominated. It’s not a big surprise to see the Japanese companies lagging, but China’s tech companies often have a higher proportion of female executives than their American counterparts. Not in gaming. Worrying, since the Asia-Pacific region are by far the leaders and hold the largest market share. This should be attracting a lot more attention and concern than it is.
Time to Level Up: Five companies of the Top 14 have no women on their Executive Teams, including the Chinese gaming behemoth Tencent. Does this matter? Women and men users generally have different preferences when it comes to gaming. Men tend to lean towards shooting people, women towards strategy and simulation. Like most male-dominated sectors, these companies’ ability or interest in understanding and connecting with female consumers may be hampered by their corporate cultures. And with their current explosive growth rates, will they care? As billions of people locked down in front of their screens imbibe stereotypes we thought we’d grown out of decades ago, will we care?
This massive industry is stealthily taking over as our major human culture fodder. It will have a huge and very global impact. While the Bechdel test for movies has helped nudge the balance in film, there isn’t enough attention yet on the far more widespread gaming sector. Time for all of us to start paying more attention to what’s on our screens. And into these companies’ leadership teams. We get what we design – or what we ignore.
Which means devs like Riot and Epic will lose whatever Chinese influence they have.
