Game design still predominantly a WASP male world: IGDA survey

The International Game Developers Association recently released its Game Developer Demographics: An Exploration of Workforce Diversity report, a global survey that for the first time examined the demographics and makeup of the game development workforce. Almost 6,500 game industry professionals responded to the survey, some of the key findings of which are outlined below.Ethnicity With over 83% of respondents identifying as white, there can be no doubt that the industry is heavily weighted towards one particular group. For the UK, Australia, Canada and the USA, we can clearly state that there is very little "ethnic" diversity and that the stereotype of the game industry as predominantly white appears to have some basis...Looking at total compensation earned, we can see a sizable gap between white and the various non-white ethnic groups...Some of the discrepancy can likely be attributed to the fact that, on average, whites have been in the industry for approximately two years longer than black and Hispanic workers. Years-in-industry and work experience in general has a large impact on compensation, as described in the below section on age. Gender Of the respondents to the game developer survey, 11.5% identified as female and 88.5% identified as male. When asked to comment on industry demographics and diversity in general, many women made comments like "Need more women in the industry, and in order to do so will need to eliminate ‘boys only’ practices such as ‘Booth Bimbos’...The extreme lack of female programmers can be linked to the struggle in general to attract women students into computer science and engineering education as career paths...Looking at average total compensation earned, we can see a $9,000 gap between male and female workers. Unlike the case with ethnicity, the average male worker has not been in the industry much longer than his female counterparts. One could assume that the job roles with the most women are generally less lucrative, but this is not supported by the survey data. Sexual Orientation/Transgender Heterosexual workers dominate the industry, though there is a noteworthy number of other orientations...Only 0.96% of respondents identified themselves as transgender. This low percentage is to be expected, as transgender individuals are estimated to be less than 3% of the general population. Interestingly, no one who had a complaint against the survey targeted this question - most had problems with questioning their sexuality in general. Age and Years in the Industry The game development community is a young one, with 31 years being the average age for the workforce. A scatter plot of age demonstrates a left-skewed bell-type curve. The average number of years working in the industry is 5.4, with a huge amount of workers having two years or less of experience in the game industry. There are several outliers (e.g., the highest response was 37 years of experience!), but the industry’s wizened "graybeards" are few in number. From this data, we can see that the majority of people who work in the industry are young and have not been in it for long. There does seem to be a small minority of people who have worked in the industry for a long time - but they are greatly outnumbered by the massive number of young, new workers.

Game design still predominantly a WASP male world: IGDA survey

Broadcast | October 27, 2005

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