The games industry is made up of a number of specialities including development, production, design, level design, audio design, art and testing (Green et.al.,2007).
The 2008 Oxford Economics report suggest that the UK games industry has over 9000 employees, the online games magazine, suggests that the percentage of women within the games industry in core creation or developmental roles is around just 6.9%. Recent figures produced by Skillset (2009) found that women represent 4% of the game industry’s workforce, a decrease from 12% in 2006 (Skillset, 2006).
It would appear that the industry is losing its battle to increase its appeal to a more diverse workforce.
Both horizontal and vertical gender segregation is claimed to exist within the games industry. Vertical segregation represents the difference in the numbers of women and men in the more senior roles within the industry, example according to Krotoski (2004) only 0.4% of female employees in the UK games industry are in lead, director or management positions, whilst 1.2% of male employees hold these jobs. This suggests that there is horizontal as well as vertical segregation within the industry.
This table shows the percentage of men and women in each job description within the gaming industry.
This tables show that a majority of women in the games industry tend to work in managerial, admin, marketing and public relation roles. And because of this women are lacking in all the other roles therefore have no say or very little voice when it come to content, interaction styles, character representation and reward system which are all involved in games.
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