Pixelles is a volunteer-run nonprofit aiming to help more women make games, and improve games culture. It was founded in 2013 in Montreal, Canada, and boasts many successful programs, including incubators, workshops, events, and scholarships, which have helped hundreds of women enter and stay in the game industry..
Diversity and inclusivity programs are fairly common in bigger game studios now. They typically involve a better interview process, a mentorship program, and employee work-groups themed around different demographics. Some boast 50% or higher rates of hiring women, especially into junior positions.
Diversity initiatives tend to focus primarily on hiring for several enticing reasons:
The existing population of experienced developers, especially in core roles, is staggeringly homogenous
Universities, colleges, and internship programs are enthusiastic collaborators
Success is easily tracked
Pixelles, a feminist non-profit, also started by focusing on training up new, aspiring, and junior women developers. But after speaking to some aspiring narrative designers, a mentor pulled me aside to express concern.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she said. “They all want to work at my old studio. The one that I’m still going to therapy for years later. I can’t in good conscience help them enter that meat grinder.”
It stopped us in our tracks. She was right. Churn in games has always been a source of concern, but marginalized people burn out and leave the industry at a significantly faster rate than their colleagues*. And when the average career is five years long, that means they’re churning very quickly indeed. That’s why we’ve started our career accelerator here in Montreal a few years ago (previously called a co-development or peer mentorship), kindly sponsored this year by Motive Studios EA.
What does it matter if your diverse hires don’t stick around once they’re experienced?
What does it mean if, years after hiring a broad and diverse cast of entry-level developers, the managers all still look the same?
It means all of those hiring programs are just churning those developers through the system and claiming success, before spitting them back out into the world just a few years later. As it turns out, “The Boys’ Club doesn’t disband just because you hire women.”
The reasons women leave can be difficult to see, from the perspective of HR or company leadership, because nobody wants to burn bridges in their exit interviews. So it often just “seems” to “coincidentally” happen that women trickle away over time.
However, we’ve spoken to dozens of women that have thought of leaving their company, and/or the game industry. Several key elements listed below lead to women** feeling they have no choice but to leave your studio, or the industry as a whole.
*Accelerated burnout of marginalized people has been our personal observation, based on a network of thousands of game developers over many years. However, we don’t have hard data to support this belief, as game companies do not track this data. If you manage to convince yours (or the IGDA) to start tracking it, we’d love to hear about it.
**It’s possible these same elements also affect people of color, other marginalized genders, folks of different abilities, etc. However, we suspect each demographic has unique needs that would benefit from tailored support, so even though some statements were given by women of intersectional identities, we’ve restricted our statements to women only.
1. Seeing no clear path of advancement, and/or having a lack of role models.
Most people need to see someone like them succeed in order to believe it’s possible for themselves within an organization. An absence of role models is one of the top indicators of an otherwise-invisible glass ceiling. Therefore, you need to hire or retain a woman at the senior/management level, to hope to keep many women long-term.
If your women keep leaving as juniors or mid-level devs, this can trap your culture into a bitter cycle, requiring high investment in hiring women at the highest levels of power to change culture from the top down.
Solution 1: Promote more women within your organization into leadership.
Solution 2: Hire women into the management and executive levels.
Solution 3: Increase powerful womens’ visibility within your organization (with their consent)
2. Rigid work schedule expectations.
“Being able to design how I work was a requirement if I want to have the work/life balance I need”
“They wouldn’t let me take unpaid leave when I needed to, so I had to quit.”
“There was a period in my life when I could only work 3 days a week, and my company would never allow or support that.”
Women are more likely to need to take time off or work flexibly. Even if you manage to eliminate all expectations of overtime/crunch, women are more likely to have dependents (children, elderly parents, etc.) and feel obligated to properly care for them. Therefore, women will then also suffer disproportionately from any rigidity in your work expectations.
Partial Solution: Eliminate ‘crunch’.
Full Solution: Allow for part-time work or time off as needed.
3. Feeling they must choose between succeeding at the company and being a mother.
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