Of Game Developers Are Women

The International Game Developer's Association or IGDA represents the interests of thousands of developers worldwide. Over the past few months, they've been steadily releasing data from a recent poll of their members about demographics, working conditions, and more.

Here are some of the highlights:

The number of women in games has almost doubled in the past years from 12% to 22% but assuming the current rate holds, it'll still be over 20 years before there is parity between men and women.

Just over 2% identified as "transgender" or "other" bringing that in-line with low-end estimates of the trans population in general.

The top ten studios developers want to work for are, in descending order: Valve, their own company, Activision Blizzard, BioWare, Ubisoft, Current employer, Nintendo, Naughty Dog, Double Fine, and Bethesda Game Studios.

Of those polled, 41% said that they got into games so that they could "earn a living doing what I enjoy". That said the top reason for leaving is "better quality of life".

This comes hot on the heels of the ESA survey from earlier this year. Echoing what many of us have known for some time, the organization found that adult women now outnumbered teenage boys as the most active game players. They also found 59% of Americans regularly play games, and that there are two gamers per household. Altogether, game sales also came to over $21 billion last year.

The times they are a-changin'.

You're reading Numbers, a blog on Kotaku that examines games and culture through the lens of math and statistics. To contact the author of this post, write to dancstarkey@gmail.com or find him on Twitter @dcstarkey.