According to research, half of gamers are women.
But maybe you haven’t noticed.
The Dungeons and Dragons society at my university is split pretty equally between men and women. Originally, in the first meeting, to which fifty people showed up (a very impressive amount for D&D), there were about ten girls, huddled together in their groups, largely eyeing up the rest of the room to decide how intimidated they were going to be. It wasn’t because the game was difficult, it was because we were all aware of how unwelcome women are within ‘nerd’ spaces.
Shows like The Big Bang Theory inaccurately represent the amount of female gamers and sci-fi nerds, and so reinforce a stereotype that we’re either faking our interest, or wholly unattractive for it. I have only once stepped foot in my local gaming shop — despite really wanting to go in there and look at the board games on the back wall — because it is always filled with men, and only men, and it feels unwelcome because of that.
I wouldn’t have even joined the D&D society if there hadn’t been a girl sitting at their table at the Fresher’s Fayre. She knew this and stayed all day, and so as the uninterested wandered from the society, and a few stragglers joined, we have an even split of men and women, sharing a space of collaborate fantasy story-telling and role play.
In the USA, females account for 42% of gamers, whilst in the UK, we make up 52% of gamers — 25% of whom admitting to playing games everyday. Women are so clearly here, filling the space of the ‘nerd community’ — but that then begs the question: why are we ignored?
Like I said before, inaccurate (and not-particularly-good) shows like Big Bang are skewing our perception of not just nerd culture, but also women within it. But there’s more to it than that: there’s the media, pedalling this version of the nerd that’s white, male and terribly bullied (see: Big Bang, Stranger Things, most kids’ TV shows), there’s the prevalent fragile masculinity, and there’s plain sexism.
Even though women were all over the place in science and technology fields during the past 100 years — like Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Mary Keller — men somehow wrangled this image of technology being a male pursuit.
Steve Henn noted that the decline in women in tech began in the 80’s, when the personal computer was first introduced:
“These early personal computers weren’t much more than toys. You could play pong or simple shooting games, maybe do some word processing. And these toys were marketed almost entirely to men and boys. This idea that computers are for boys became a narrative. It became the story we told ourselves about the computing revolution. It helped define who geeks were, and it created techie culture.”
Because of this narrative, it has taken almost forty years for women to even the odds on the tech front once again. We were so excluded from the image of gaming, of science and technology that we didn’t understand that we invented it. Mary Shelley, the mother of science fiction, Katherine Johnson, the African-American woman who calculated the trajectory of humanity’s first trip to the moon, Joyce Weisbecker, the first female video game designer.
Women have been here all along, but we’ve been excluded — and we still are! We’re excluded straight off the bat, with games being marketed towards boys and the sneers that I have personally received over calling myself a gamer. Not only that, but I’m a perpetrator of it, too. I, like so many others, have been moulded to see gaming as a boy’s activity, so much so that when my female friends told me, only a few years ago, that they loved Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto, I thought they were faking it to look cooler and more interesting. It was later that I saw them play, saw how much fun they were having, and realised that I’m not the exception: I’m not the one girl out of a thousand that plays games. In fact, there are millions of us.
As was said in an interview in 2014, with Jeremy Crawford, lead designer and managing editor of D&D:
“…The newest version of the game credits women as contributors to its design more than any previous one: About 26% are female, as opposed to 20% in the last version and 12% in the one before that. It’s also telling that three-quarters of D&D’s branding and marketing team is now female.”
More women are playing D&D because more women are creating D&D — and the same goes for games across the board; STEM across the board. If girls see women succeeding in those fields, they’ll want to join, too.
But we have been here all along, so in future, let’s not act surprised about it.
With thanks to Florentina Mitrache and Ellena Restrick
