The Women in Games initiative has launched an ambassador program that’s being sponsored by Google’s Women Tech Makers division. The idea is to double the amount of women working in the video game industry over the course of 10 years.
According to a report by GamesIndustry.biz, the Women In Games ambassadorship program will see 43 individual female ambassadors working with educators and industry leaders, along with local government in order to encourage young girls at schools, colleges and universities to consider a career in game making.
They’re attempting to form long-term partnership deals and establish “strategic relationships” in order to push forward with the initiative to raise the amount of women working in the tech field.
According to Marie-Claire Isaaman, CEO of Women In Games, she mentioned in the press statement…
“During our 2016 European Women in Games Conference I ran a workshop to initiate this scheme and the enthusiasm and drive of the individuals who attended was extraordinary. We are extremely excited to see what our Ambassadors will achieve and confident that this initiative will have substantial impact in supporting us with our strategic goals.”
According to UBM Tech’s GDC 2017 survey, only 20% of the industry professionals who participated in the survey identify as a woman.
The industry leaders from major groups like the IGDA and the organizers of GDC, along with tech leaders like Google, Facebook, Twitter and Intel, have been heavily pushing to get more women into the STEM field, and by proxy, tech fields like interactive entertainment.
What’s interesting is that according to a research report from Accenture, they estimate that unless women are heavily encouraged (forced?) into STEM fields the number of women working in the computer engineering and tech field will decrease from 24% to 22% by 2025, as reported by USA Today.
However, these numbers may not be too far off based on the 2016 Raytheon STEM Index, which revealed that while fewer women showed interest electrical engineering, computer science and coding, they overwhelmingly showed a great deal of interest in veterinarian science and medicinal fields, making up for 80% of the those enrolled at Cornell University in the field of Veterinary Medicine, as reported by US News.
The decline in interest in computer science by a majority of women and an increase in interest in biology and medicine isn’t some grand conspiracy according to Cornell University psychologist Wendy Williams. She explains that women are simply choosing to pursue the fields they find interesting, saying…
“Women are choosing to do different things. Everyone doesn’t want to be an electrical engineer or to do computer science, and that’s not a failure or flaw,”
Women In Games seems to disagree, hence why they’re pursuing, aggressively, various methods to bring more women into the computer science field at younger ages and to further encourage them to get into the field of interactive entertainment and making video games. They’ll continue to use Google’s sponsorship funds to turn this goal into a reality over the next 10 years.
