BBC’s story quotes David Gardner of EA, the producer of Sims and many other games, which he says are played by 90% of boys and 40% of girls.
Something’s felt a little off with those generalized statistics about what young people are doing. What it signals to my mind is a real disconnect and cleft, not just in the gaming industry but in software and hardware industries too. There’s ample evidence suggesting that girls are “not welcome” in engineering and computer science cultures from the beginning–in school. Technology is gendered, historically and systemically.