> http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/education/4530583.stm
Thanks for pointing that out, Helen. The Guardian has an article on this too (http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/news/0,12597,1479780,00.html), which includes a couple of interesting statistics: "Women make up only 17% of the industry's workforce, with only 2% employed in technical and software development positions." Interesting that the percentage of women in technical games development positions is as low as the percentage of women involved in free software development. Josie Fraser first alerted me to the Guardian article in her blog post (http://fraser.typepad.com/edtechuk/2005/05/uk_computer_gam.html) a couple of days ago. She makes a great point: "The University are going to hold some taster days to try and address the problem. Good for them. But it's a national issue that needs to be addressed nationally, as well as consistently, starting with 5 year old kids. And we also need to address this constant type-casting of girls and women as interested in fundamentally different genres of games than boys. The insistence that women only like nurturing, co-operative non-violent titles is an old chestnut that turns up again and again in these kind of articles and is probably more about reinforcing gender stereotypes than who actually plays what and when and why." Josie's remark reminds me of a thread on Slashdot a few years ago which discussed whether women need an OS specifically designed for women (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/09/16/0748211) -- another example of type-casting women and girls, and in a way that is even more pertinent to Debian Women. (The article linked to by Slashdot was not suggesting the creation of such an OS, but rather pointing out that many members of LinuxChix found the idea to be counter-productive; many of the Slashdot commenters, however, had other ideas.) -- hanna m. wallach blog: http://join-the-dots.org/ work: http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/hmw26/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
