Tech industries tend to be male dominated usually. Owing to the demographics of how IT developed in the early 1970s, men ended up being the bulk of people in most tech companies in the United States. However, game development has increasingly started to see more and more women lead projects—Amy Hennig (the creator of Uncharted), Jade Raymond (the former producer of Assassin’s Creed), and Bonnie Ross (the producer of Halo) are just some examples.
The latter of those, Bonnie Ross from 343 Industries, has noted that she hopes that the gender gap in game development will close soon, with as many women encouraged to get into making games as men.
“Boys and men, the numbers are moving up. We are getting a lot more into computer science. But with women and girls, it’s going down,” she said in an interview with CBS. “In many times there’s not even a way where I could bring a woman into a specific job because the candidates are just not there.”
The issue is that there just aren’t enough women trying to get into the field, and those who do get in end up getting so many job offers that it ends up being a buyer’s market at that point. The easy solution to the problem would be to have more women get interested in IT and computer sciences, which, along with the rising interest in games among women, should hopefully cause more of them to want to look into game development.
Bonnie Ross recently also had some great comments on avoiding crunch during game development, which you should check out as well.