Making Games Industry Job Applications Accessible and Inclusive — Part 1

Published in

Crayta

5 min readMay 17, 2018

This is part 1 of a 4 part series written about a survey we recently performed to try and figure out how to improve the diversity among applicants for jobs we advertised within the games industry.

Part 1 — Background (you are here! ;) )
Part 2 — Method
Part 3 — Results
Part 4 — Conclusions

Background

First off, a bit of history, just so you have some idea of what we’re working with here.

We are a small (approximately 25 people) games studio in Leamington Spa, UK. We were formed at the end of 2017 and since then have had roughly 10 vacancies that we have either filled or still have open.

These vacancies have attracted 67 applicants. Not a huge sample size, but still large enough to draw some conclusions.

Across all those applicants, 90% were male¹.

Gender split across all our applicants — 89.6% male, 10.4% female

And this doesn’t vary if we start to look at demographics per discipline².

Gender split broken down by discipline. Artist — 93.02% male, 6.98% female. Programmer — 81.82% male, 18.18% female.

So, yeah. This is our baseline. Ouch.

But why does it matter?

Well, there’s the fairly obvious “let’s try to be good humans and afford everyone the same opportunities regardless of their background” factor.

At least, I hope that’s obvious. If it’s not, maybe have a word with yourself, yeah?

So, aside from that, if you need more of a reason to push for a diverse workforce there are well-documented business benefits.

I’m not going to ramble on about this in a huge amount of detail, but I’ll put some good articles in the footnotes³ so if you are interested in this topic, check those out.

For now though, I’ll just pull out these stats⁴:

Compared to individual decision makers, all-male teams make better business decisions 58% of the time, while gender diverse teams do so 73% of the time.
Teams that also include a wide range of ages and different geographic locations make better business decisions 87% of the time.
Companies in the top quartile for racial and ethnic diversity are 35 percent more likely to have financial returns above their respective national industry medians.
For companies in the UK, for every 10% increase in gender diversity on the senior-executive team, earnings before interest and taxes rose by 3.5%.

Gif of Donald Duck counting money. This could be you if you hire more diverse teams! Except, probably (hopefully?) you won’t turn into a duck.

Hopefully by now you’re convinced that not only is working towards diversity the right thing to do on a moral basis, it also makes business sense (and is likely to have an increasingly positive effect given the increase in political awareness among consumers).

Why is there this discrepancy?

There’s a fair amount of data and research already into why it can be difficult to hire diverse teams, especially within technology. Again, I’m not going to deep dive into it, there are plenty of articles which do a better job of that that I do (see the footnotes⁵!). However, there are a few key aspects that account for a hell of a lot of the difficulty in getting diverse applicants.

For example, this oft-quoted statistic:

Men apply for a job when they meet only 60% of the qualifications, but women apply only if they meet 100% of them.

As well as the fact that technology jobs went through a phase (which they thankfully seem to be getting out of now…) of using very “masculine” terms or phrases in job descriptions. Some as blatantly brogrammer⁶ as ninja, rockstar, or foosball. Some less obvious (ambitious, assertive, takes risks⁷).

There’s also the elephant in the room — it’s very difficult to hire diverse people into a non-diverse team. No one wants to feel like the token hire, or that they’ll encounter discrimination or other issues because they don’t fit the mould. This is, unfortunately, a bit of a catch 22 and it can be even worse when it’s across a whole industry rather than an individual team.

Gif of a sleepy baby Dumbo the elephant. This elephant in the room is cute. The one I describe in the text is not.

Only 35% of girls who studied STEM subjects at GCSE chose to pursue STEM subjects at A level (or equivalent), compared with 94% of boys.⁸

So what have we done already?

Prior to running our survey, we had already taken steps to try and offset some of the above issues.

We added a diversity statement to our site, making it explicit that we welcome applications from under-represented groups.

We aim to build an inclusive and diverse development studio. We therefore strongly encourage applicants from backgrounds that aren’t always well-represented within the industry.

We also keep an eye on the language we use in job descriptions to try and counter any hidden biases that may creep in there, as well as ensuring that “requirements” sections are truly only the required attributes or skills (we often have large “desirable” sections instead as a result).

Did it help?

To be honest, it’s hard to tell. We hadn’t had many applicants before we started taking these measures, and so we don’t have sufficient data to try and draw meaningful conclusions.

However, the data seems to suggest that even if it did help, it was nowhere near enough to make much of a dent in a very uneven recruitment pool.

But why?

Gif of Annie from Community asking “why is this happening?”

Well, that’s why we did this survey. Honestly, we’ve read a ton of articles, blog posts, etc. about diversity, especially within technology, but it felt like we’d applied the “best practice” and it wasn’t enough.

How better to find out more accurately what the problems were (and hopefully therefore how to resolve them) than by asking under-represented people directly what they needed? So that’s what we did.