Rewind to one afternoon in 2006 and I'm at my first academic conference about computer games. I've been a technology journalist for a decade, a veteran of countless tech events on both a grand and small scale and this is the first time in 10 years I've had to queue for the loo. "Ah," I think to myself as I wait my turn, "this is where all the women are." The men make the technology, while the women think about it.
However, any suggestion that the consumer and software technology industries are demographically stratified is an overwhelming understatement. The industry does little to help itself: networking socials in strip clubs; "booth babes" at trade events – scantily clad models swamped by hungry geeks; the misogynistic-toned "brogrammer" culture that's making women uncomfortable with questionable recruitment tactics, and perks such as bring-a-girl-to-the-office-days. There's a virtual absence of anyone with an XX chromosome on prestige panels at the biggest conferences of the industry calendar, and that's just the stuff the public sees.
This isn't encouraging for the young women who excel at computer science and maths in school. The drop-off for more advanced study in these areas among women is astonishing. At GCSE and A-level girls achieve better grades than the boys, yet those women who do pursue computing to higher education find themselves in classes where 82% of students are men.
In 2005, women made up 24% of computer science students. By 2010, that figure had dropped to 19%, according to the Higher Education Statistics Agency. A 2012 report from Creative Skillset found that only 29% of the interactive media industry in the UK is female, and the majority hold positions in art and design and communications rather than engineering.
Educators have been gnashing their collective teeth to figure out why. The best explanation, from years of analysis and interviewing, is that computing is not viewed as a girls' sport. Young women aren't exposed to computing, or steered in that direction by parents, peers or career counsellors. Recent headlines about gender pay gap disparities won't help matters.
Yet the technology industry is not without impressive female role models. Three of the most powerful tech companies in the world are headed by women: Sheryl Sandberg, chief operating officer of Facebook, is on a mission to encourage women to "lean in" to business challenges to make it to the top; Yahoo!'s chief executive is Marissa Mayer, who held executive positions at search giant Google after starting her ascent as the first female engineer in the company. And the president and chief executive of IBM, Virginia Rometty, graduated with honours from Northwestern University with a double major in computer science and electrical engineering.
The employment problem has real-world implications when you consider that these are the people who are building the technology that we use to navigate and make sense of the world. How can systems like Google and Facebook be fully informed about what we want and need when there's little to no input from 52% of the world's population?
Let me explain. A newspaper article includes a headline that attracts the reader. Most people would understand that certain interviewees have been chosen to fulfil certain roles, certain fonts have been chosen to draw attention and certain words have been included to drive a point home. We know this because we are taught literacy in schools.
A city is designed by an architect to filter us through it in certain ways: a community centre or park is a place to gather while a business district needs to facilitate efficient communication. These are just a few of the subconscious but built-in linguistics of our physical environments.
A software engineer performs exactly the same type of role. They are our guide through the modern world of information and communication. He (or she) builds an invisible world to direct our sightlines to particular sources or people. Yet because only half the demographic understands or is involved in the application of these digital linguistic tools, users' worldviews are filtered by a myopic architecture.
Different perspectives yield positive commercial results, and so there's impetus to employ and train a diverse workforce. In 2004, game designer Sheri Graner-Ray published the book Gender-Inclusive Game Design, aimed at inspiring the male-dominated world of twitch-and-war game developers to consider alternative audiences. Graner-Ray's secondary objective was to get girls playing games, and therefore get them educated in the architectural language of the design process.
In the 10 years since, the proportion of women in engineering and design in the computer games industry has increased to its highest level since 2004. Graner-Ray alone cannot be credited with this, but her gender-inclusive suggestions have found their way into many mainstream games, providing hands-on understanding of the grammar.
There is a long way to go before there is parity between the genders in the technology industry. But every baby step made has a tiny effect on the representational content of the diverse audience that uses software and hardware. Developers are known to develop solutions for themselves. So let's get more kinds of people inside – and let's fill up those women's loos.
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