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[Urist Tilaturist]

I thought the computers did most of the maths nowadays...

Toady obviously has great maths skill, but he is learning programming as he goes along. I would not say they were really the same discipline at all.

[Neonivek]

I thought the computers did most of the maths nowadays...

Toady obviously has great maths skill, but he is learning programming as he goes along. I would not say they were really the same discipline at all.

Toady learned programming through math.

[Urist Tilaturist]

Obviously computers read only numbers, but programming seems to involve applied maths in the same way that engineering does; it is dependent, but not the same and being very good at one does nit guarantee success in the other.

[Neonivek]

Obviously computers read only numbers, but programming seems to involve applied maths in the same way that engineering does; it is dependent, but not the same.

Indeed, but "I don't like math" does gate things a bit.

[Urist Tilaturist]

"I don't like math" would also bar careers in most sciences and finance.

I have no idea what the class compositions of computer science and maths majors are in the USA, but it is very possible to program games without a computer science degree. No one with an aversion to maths would do it anyway.

[Virtz]

I think they actually don't avoid maths as much as Computer Science, though. At my college, the neighbouring Mathematics major had way more women than CS did, from what I recall

True, but computer science, to me, is a subset of maths... even if it is somewhat unrelated the fact remains that if you want to be a programmer you have to be good at math.

Actually I've had people in my group that were really good at maths, particularly the theoretical and analytical stuff, but were terrible at programming. I was good at programming, but bad with maths (although I still got mostly decent grades through hard work).

Like I guess there's really basic maths that you need to know how to do in order to program well, but the sorts of maths presented in college you may or may not know and still be able to program. It didn't seem to correlate much with programming quality.

[Reelya]

Well 18% of computer science graduates are female. If we assume that the industry is completely gender-blind then you'd expect 18% of hires to be female, because those are the pool of qualified graduates. Let's assume that both genders have equal talent, on average.

If you apply some preferential treatment to the smaller pool, you do end up with less qualified people getting hired, it's just the way things like that work. Consider that 82% of nursing trainees are female and 18% are male. If you put in a quota system where 50% of the nurses you hired had to be male, then you can bet that a lot of the men they'd have to hire would be low-performing chumps, basically because you burn through the pool of highly talented male applicants much quicker than the bigger female talent pool, and as soon scraping the bottom of the barrel hiring knuckle-dragging neanderthal men. This is just how the numbers work, when you start by assuming that both genders have an equal talent for something, but there are differing sizes of the talent pool.

Also, if you compare 10 years ago with now, the number of female computer science graduates has massively fallen, whilst the number of women in games development roles has massively risen. If the games industry was completely neutral towards gender, then the percentage of female workers should closely track the graduate pool, but it has in fact gone the other way: the games industry employs more women than ever, at a time when there are the LEAST percentage of female graduates with relevant qualifications than any time since 1974.

[alexandertnt]

Does "Game developers" refer to just programmers in this case? If not, then comparing CS grad numbers to the number of "game developers" is not very useful. Programming is a suprisingly small part of the industry.

I couldn't find any statictics on the number of female game programmers on a quick try, partially because some people seem to think that everyone who works in the game industry is a programmer, and the result is a lot of varying statistics.

The IGDA survey identifies 22% of those in the industry are female, where "those in the industry" refers to "anyone who is involved in the video game industry in a professional or academic capacity... ...including professors, students, contractors, indies, and so forth.". Given that some areas (such as art) have a much higher percentages of women, then it may very well be the number of programmers who are women could be somewhere below 22% I'm not sure though, there is a lot of conflicting information out there.

EDIT: This survey states that women make up a whopping 5% of game industry programmers. Which is actually well below the percentage of female CS graduates. Women seem to have a higher representation in roles like design and business (though they still seems to be very low).

These surveys are going to be subject to selection bias though, some of these organisations may be better known/respected in different areas (indie/AAA etc).

[Neonivek]

We are talking about programmers in this game.

Since yeah, you can be in the gaming industry with a business degree or with no education and you simply test games.

[wobbly]

Women devs do make indie games, but it is hard to get backing and the male populace is often hostile to them being the developers.

I doubt this very much. For a start it assumes the average gamer looks at who's developing, programming etc. a game. I know I don't. They could be male, female or a bunch of trained monkeys for all I know. I'm simply more interested in the game play then who's actually writing it (especially as I'm unlikely to recognize the name anyway)

[Neonivek]

Well wobbly think of it a different way

If a you say a game and on the back or even the front was a blurb or tagline that said "Developed by a woman"

What would you think?

Now I don't mean something like "Roberta Williams" or anyone's specific name. I mean where you are being sold a game on the basis that a woman is the head of the team.

THAT is an easy way to prove Smeeprocket's point. SURE, it is more because people are antagonistic towards the idea of "Why does it matter?", but it would be a situation where smeeprocket is correct.

Though that isn't what Smeeprocket means. You just have to know what Smeeprocket means by "Most men are antagonistic towards women who want to be developers", which is that some men are against women being developers, and because you aren't antagonistic towards those men, you are being antagonistic towards all women. At least if I am correctly reading Smeeprocket's credo.

[wobbly]

Well wobbly think of it a different way

If a you say a game and on the back or even the front was a blurb or tagline that said "Developed by a woman"

What would you think?

Now I don't mean something like "Roberta Williams" or anyone's specific name. I mean where you are being sold a game on the basis that a woman is the head of the team.

I'd ignore it as marketing nonsense like I do most of the blurb. The blurb on the back of games annoy me because they read like a film blurb without telling me much about the stlye or type of game and I remember when it was otherwise but that's another tangent of course.

Why would I care whether it was written by a woman or man? Tells me very little about the content. It tells me what there marketing department wants to sell it based on, but often a marketing team has little connection to the people in programing and game design.

[Eurylochus]

I think males are seen by people as epic and heroic, I'd prefer to play a male character over a female character, simply because I don't female characters that exciting and inspiring to great deeds. I see them as feminine.

[Eurylochus]

I think males are seen by people as epic and heroic, I'd prefer to play a male character over a female character, simply because I don't find female characters that exciting and inspiring to great deeds. I see them as feminine.

[Xantalos]

I'll point to the oft-pointed to FemShep from Mass Effect as a decided counterpoint.