Dontnod Montreal on recruiting for gender balance
Brendan Sinclair
Managing Editor
Friday 1st April 2022
DONTNOD Entertainment
In an industry that has struggled to become a more welcoming place for women, Dontnod Montreal has achieved the rare feat of having a gender breakdown that nearly matches that of the general population.
Founded in 2020, the Canadian outpost of the Life is Strange development studio has grown to a staff of 33 employees, 16 of them women. Dontnod Montreal's Frédérique Fourny-Jennings tells the GamesIndustry.biz Academy that didn't happen by accident.
Fourny-Jennings says the push started with Dontnod Montreal's studio executive producer Luc Baghadoust and studio creative director Michel Koch.
"When they initially reached out to me for the managing director position, they shared the vision they had for the studio. Although we are a Dontnod studio and Dontnod is quite known for strong values around inclusivity and diversity, they had a strong idea of what they wanted to put in place for a studio in Montreal. As they were telling me about this, that's what struck me: the [values] you could find in Dontnod games were totally relating to what they wanted to be in the studio, if that makes sense."
"The [values] you could find in Dontnod games were totally relating to what they wanted to be in the studio"
Fourny-Jennings says she saw the Dontnod position as an opportunity to consider how she would go about recruiting herself and extrapolate that out to pitches and practices that would appeal to women in the industry as effectively as men.
"What can we do create this kind of environment where we make women feel they can apply to our company? Or promote an environment they would consider safe? All these things I was doing without thinking too much about it because
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