Report: How Women Navigate Crunch, Abuse, And Lack Of Opportunities In The Gaming Industry
thegamer.comJenny McKearney fell in love with computer science at her all-girls school in Northern Ireland. When she was studying in the 1980s, this was a new subject, and one that excited her. Of course, being at an all-girls school meant she had no idea how male-dominated the field would be.
“I chose computer science at university, and there were five girls and 70 guys”, Jenny says. “I was like, ‘Oh, it's a bit funny. What happened there?’”
Undeterred, she graduated in 1995 and jumped into the gaming industry, working in localization. Her first gig was at Microsoft’s Dublin base, and while this took her to work with all kinds of great teams - including over at BioWare, where she worked on Mass Effect and Dragon Age for 14 years - the gender discrepancy was always obvious.
Related: So, What Games Are Women Supposed To Play, Exactly?
“[When] I started working at BioWare, I met the 400 people that work there. I was like, ‘Oh crap, there are 20 women’. And we weren’t on production. We were in HR, we were in marketing. And there were maybe like two programmers and one artist.” McKearney says.
“Now, it got better over the years. I was there for 14 years and I saw a huge swing in the industry. I think back to the class I graduated from in ‘95. What would that look like now in 2022?”
That’s why I’m speaking to McKearney and three other women in the gaming industry today. Jenny McKearney, Debbie Gonzalez, Louise Andrew, and Ashley Liu all operate in wildly different areas of game development, but all exist under the Keywords umbrella of companies. Working with Keywords sees them working on all kinds of games - most recently the likes of League of Legends, Mortal Kombat, and Assassin’s Creed. Even though the amount of women and non-binary
Read more on thegamer.com
