Code Liberation Foundation Working to Fix Sexism in Games

[roseofbattle]

Code Liberation Foundation Working to Fix Sexism in Games

Code Liberation Foundation plans to "woman up" and inspire aspiring female programmers and gamemakers.

The four women of Code Liberation Foundation got together with the aim of providing safe spaces for women to learn how to code. At IndieCade East they spoke about their shared experiences growing up with media that discouraged their voices and how they plan to change video games' image problem. Their solution - teach women how to code and that their voices are important.

Code Liberation Foundation's Catt Small, Phoenix Perry, Jane Friedhoff, and Nina Freeman are all women who were interested in programming at a young age but were discouraged from the field before college. They're now all back to making games and hope to fix the damage that prevents women from entering the field.

In her portion of the talk, Perry delivered harsh statistics. A Bureau of Labor Statistics chart showed a decline in women programmers since 1991. In 1987, 42 percent of American programmers were women. Now only 25 percent of programmers are women. In games programming specifically, women make up four percent.

Perry believes advertising is the cause behind the change decline in the 1990s. At this time, companies were heavily advertising personal computers, targeting men as family breadwinners. She displayed numerous misogynistic ads, one of which read, "Don't feel bad, our servers won't go down on you either." Game companies had similar ads, and one depicted a man handing a crying woman a tissue with his foot because he was too busy playing a game.

Small explained to the audience that as a woman growing up during this time, media fed her messages that women lie, fight over men, and exist to have a family. She pointed to covers of Cosmopolitan and said, "Society pushes us to be this amazing, sexy, tiny goddess who does nothing but have sex and know the perfect moves for her guy and the perfect style." In comparison, Perry showed an issue of Cosmopolitan from 1967 that featured a female programmer.

The problem continues today. Perry pointed to several gaming advertisements, such as a Sony ad that compared the PlayStation Vita to a woman with four breasts. Perry says it's time to fix this image problem, but how? "We undo the damage," Perry answers. "We woman up."

Code Liberation offers free classes for women on GameMaker, Unity, HTML, openFrameworks, and Processing. At IndieCade East, Friedhoff led an all-day Processing workshop. The organization holds most of its classes at NYU's MAGNET Center in Brooklyn, NY, and plans to hold an upcoming C++ course, workshop about making games for the Kinect, and an online series for women outside of New York City. In addition, Code Liberation's slides from workshops [http://codeliberation.github.io/CLF-slides/] are available to view for free.

Code Liberation also works to inspire young girls to code and express their voices. Freeman's passion for teaching high school girls comes from the fact that computer science courses in secondary education have declined since 17 percent since 2005 and that only 18.6 percent of the students who took the AP Computer Science exam last year were women. Freeman teaches classes at a Brooklyn all-girls high school. Students who largely had never programmed before had the opportunity to make prototypes of small games, often drawing from their own experiences.

"I want to show [girls] that their voices are just as important as anyone else's," Freeman said.

By teaching women how to make their own games, Code Liberation Foundation plans to leave no coder behind. Classes are geared toward beginners with no prior experience whether you're in high school or long out of college.


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[Scorpid]

Nice! ^_^
totally on board with this shit, that's my jam!

 

[Kajin]

Awesome. More women need to get into gaming as a whole but it's never gonna happen if gaming as a whole keeps maintaining an atmosphere of hostility towards the concept of having a vagina.

 

[Ikasury]

i am all for this :3

i fiddled a bit with coding and silly things like RPGmaker, and while fun, i don't think full on game design is my thing (it took me like 2 weeks to figure out how to do just an intro cut scene XD) but i'd always love to write for a game one day...

oh well, science for now, bioengeineering later, and if i have time, i don't see why not learn a bit of programming, never know when you can use it :3

 

[CriticalMiss]

Sounds kind of cool, but I wonder about this bit. they say:

A Bureau of Labor Statistics chart showed a decline in women programmers since 1991. In 1987, 42 percent of American programmers were women. Now only 25 percent of programmers are women

Now is that an actual decline in numbers or just a decline in proportion? It seems to me more likely that there are more female programmers today than in 87, whilst many more men got in to the market since then. So not really a decline in female programmers just that more men showed up over the years than women and skweing the proportions.

And I wonder how long it will be until there is a major studio with a mostly female programming team.

Oh, and the article really should have included a link to the CLF website.

http://codeliberation.org/

 

[Objectable]

Great! So, when are game companies gonna get labor unions?

 

[RedBackDragon]

Great! So, when are game companies gonna get labor unions?

probably the same time that KFC will , when hell freezes over.

 

[Weaver]

I do have some issues with how the article is written. The organization isn't actually claiming they're going to "fix" sexism in games, they just want more female representation in programming roles. The majority programming jobs are not game development positions.

It also doesn't address the obvious divide between gender representation in a real world company and gender representation in a product. A 50% male and 50% female company could still create a game with a sexist representation of women in it, or at least what people perceive as sexist. kinucakes.tumblr.com/‎ was drawing sexy women long before Skullgirls existed.

Ranting about sensational headlines aside, Code Liberation Foundation seems to really understand the problem and they're tackling it head on. More women should get into programming roles if they want to, and their unwillingness to enter technology roles is largely a perception problem, and they want to change that and provide an environment to foster that.

This is very good IMO, and I'll probably donate next paycheck.

 

[rbstewart7263]

This is actually a good solution. I support these ladies all the way.

 

[Dragonbums]

Well, I am currently studying computer science and the amount of female students is really(!) low. While it is changing, it'll still take quite some time.
I think a big problem with such jobs in general are the stereotypes that are attached to them. They make a lot of people not even consider them, even though they'd might like them.

Which is ironic considering how the first person to make a working algorithm as Ada Lovelace, and many more women were a first into computer programming in general.


https://24.media.tumblr.com/e28c0760e07f72169365dd4878b53c87/tumblr_mzbbjw4NZO1qfsvcyo1_400.jpg

 

[Thaluikhain]

To sorta add on to this. Another factor that is always either omitted or forgotten from the conversation is the freedom of choice and outcome of opportunity.

The ability to choose one's own career path is always open to people regardless of gender. There are no actual barriers the educational system has up that prevents a person choosing what classes they want to take based on gender. If women decide that they don't want to pursue a career in computer science or programming(to which as noted by Weaver that most programming jobs are not related to game development) it is usually because they either choose not to. You can't really complain about who your peers are in a career field when the imputes is on each individual.

As for the article yeah one again sensationalist click bait wins again. Good on the group for offering the tools but it will still be the individuals choice on what they want to do in the end. Especially when there aren't any barriers by the law or by gender that stops a women from pursuing a career in programming.

Only assuming that the only barriers that exist are ones created by laws.

 

[MrMixelPixel]

Well I'll be. It's a breath of fresh air seeing everyone react so positively to this. And I will too! This is a fantastic way to fix the perceived sexism (I say perceive because I'm avoiding trying to say whether it is actually a problem or not) problems in character design and themes this industry has.

The best way to change an industry is from the inside.

 

[Ushiromiya Battler]

See, this is the way it should be done! Great job, and I'm totally behind this.

 

[Scorpid]

Well, I am currently studying computer science and the amount of female students is really(!) low. While it is changing, it'll still take quite some time.
I think a big problem with such jobs in general are the stereotypes that are attached to them. They make a lot of people not even consider them, even though they'd might like them.

Which is ironic considering how the first person to make a working algorithm as Ada Lovelace, and many more women were a first into computer programming in general.


https://24.media.tumblr.com/e28c0760e07f72169365dd4878b53c87/tumblr_mzbbjw4NZO1qfsvcyo1_400.jpg

Yeah it is strange how women get shoved out of a burgeoning industry that they helped create by men, exact same thing happened in the early days of cinema.

 

[VoidOfOne]

I agree with many people, this is a great thing to be done. Hopefully, this will turn out well, and other people will follow suit. This is one of those things that will take a long time before any fruits from the labor can be seen. But you got to start somewhere, and that start is usually small.

 

[A-D.]

Well this is..odd, i mean for one they arent really talking about sexism, because lets be honest, there is nothing inherently sexist about any field of work, although i would agree that certain types of jobs are more common to be predominantly one gender or the other, as stereotypical as it may seem, there are more female hairstylists than male ones. So i dont think the industry is keeping the girls out, or making it harder for them on purpose, but rather that there has always been this social stigma of "Nerd", i mean we still havent gotten to a point where the stereotypical perception of a Nerd is a "unwashed, zit-ridden, horn-rim-glassed geek in a basement" is a thing of the past, its moved on since then, but many still think of it in these terms.

Add to that the statistic which im going to bet is rather false, in terms of percentage yes there might be less women in programming fields, but the industry as a whole, both gaming as well as other industries which revolve around computer sciences have exploded in size, just look at the number of development studios for video games alone, there are thrice the amount now than there were in 87, if the number is not even higher. So there are more women in the industry if you simply compare numbers, even if the statistic shows otherwise because there is also a much higher number of males in these fields.

In the end though, its still a good thing, the problem really is the whole stereotype and perception issue that is attached to some job fields, so if they can get more women to be interested in working in these industries its a good thing, but its not going to fix "sexism" when it comes to character portrayals in media because, lets be obvious here, in most cases these characters are idealizations of females or males. Look at Barbie which is essentially a massively idealized, unrealistic portrayal of a woman, and thats a doll marketed towards little girls mostly. The only thing that is sure to happen if more female developers get into the industry is that there will be more eyecandy aimed towards women. The rest is speculation at best.

 

[1337mokro]

Meanwhile in the female coal miners movement allot of crickets gathered. I always have to laugh when we need a safe place for anyone to learn something. Sure there is nothing that rubs me the wrong way here, it's a nice sentiment but it just makes me laugh reading that one sentence every time.

"A safe place" because real life is always safe. Not to mention the MANY professions women have absolutely 0% interest in alleviating sexism in like miners, oil rig workers, garbage disposal, mechanical repair, lumber jacking, sewage maintenance, farming, the list literally goes on. No the men can keep those jobs.

We want to equalize the jobs that involve no nasty stuff and make lots of money, because it's always sexism that prevents women from joining those professions and never personal interest, free choice or inherent ability (you ain't gonna find many women who happily want to get coal lung compared to men).

Let's face it. There is no inherent sexism in any field and the escapist should feel ashamed that not only are they shamelessly turning into a kotaku click baiter, they also misrepresent the ideas behind this group which are far less about inherent sexism and more about the media's effect on social behaviour and the attitude towards discouraging certain types of professions based on gender... wait it's women only... forget what I said, you basically encapsulate exactly what they were about.

Now if you will excuse me I have to fight the inherent sexism present in midwifes! We need more men staring down the vagina's of women as they deliver babies!