The Best Women in Game Dev List I’ve Ever Seen

Recently the Frag Doll who goes by Rhoulette posted an article called Game Industry Women to Know: 2010. It’s the best such list I’ve ever seen. There was a particularly poor list published in 2006 that I did a numerical breakdown for. In my analysis I found that only about 22% of the women on the list were directly involved in making games. Most were VPs of marketing or business development.

I did a similar count on Rhoulette’s list, which fares a lot better. I’m not claiming this is totally accurate (for starters it looks like I only counted 48 women when there are 50 on the list), but you can see the general breakdown of positions in the following chart.

This time around, 20 out of 48 women I counted (41%) are involved directly with the creation of games. (I’m excluding journalists, academics, very high level managers etc. All these people might be involved in making games but it’s not their primary job description. I do include writers and creative directors as well as community folks who work at development studios.) This is a guess on my part but should be pretty close to the mark. This compares to the the list I critiqued from 2006 where only 22% were actual game makers of some kind.

The previous list had only one lone programmer out of 100 women (1%). This list has 3 programmers (6%), which is actually a huge increase. It’s great to see female programmers getting more visibility in the industry!