Traditionally, video game development teams have consisted of mainly male developers. Even today, I have never heard of a team being half female. My own team consists of a significantly higher proportion of females (compared to other EA teams) but we don’t even break the 25% mark unfortunately.
While nearly all my team’s project mangers are female and we have several female artists, the one job function that remains decidedly male is the role of programmer or software engineer. We’re lucky to have one female software engineer on our team and she just happens to be one of the best Playstation 3 programmers on the planet.
As further proof that female video game programmers exist, take a look at the video above. It features Anna Kipnis of Double Fine. She’s a gameplay programmer (just like me) who’s working on Brutal Legend, which is going to be published by EA. From what I’ve read, Anna and I for the most part share the same day-to-day tasks and responsibilities albeit on totally different games.
I wish the programmer / software engineer role was much more gender balanced in our industry. Perhaps we should have career days at EA specifically targeted for females. It’s a pretty fun and interesting job. Oh well, back to my dude-bicle.