I've been reading Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed For Men by Caroline Criado Perez and it got me thinking about how the huge amount of invisible work women are often burdened with is highly incompatible with "passion" careers (e.g. game dev).

In careers where passion and even single-mindedness is so highly valued and praised, people who are disproportionately burdened with invisible work and therefore have less headspace available for "single-minded passion" are doubly penalized.

The emotional and mental impact of this trap is likely (at least empirically) non-negligible and something that I know a lot of women in games think about.

Invisible work includes managing the household (chores, shopping, planning+caring for children, partners, elderly parents) but also invisible tasks at work - from organising your team's social events because you're "just naturally so good that that"...

...to managing the emotions of that awful colleague who's a great asset and is therefore allowed to continue bad behaviour or the effects of dealing with (and often feeling like the only one to at all be thinking about) institutionalised sexism on different levels.

This kind of work is crucial to the functioning of our workplaces and society, yet often goes unrecognised, unrewarded and taken for granted. (All research and numbers to back this up is literally all in the book I mentioned in the first tweet, go read it.)

To me this feels like an evolution in looking at the diversity problem; beyond the incredibly reductive (and wrong) "women are not interested in games", past the "women should lean in" vs "maybe men should lean out" argument...

...and even pointing a little beyond/beneath the discourse around the myth of meritocracy and the value we place on people embodying feminine traits vs masculine traits (though there's definitely an overlap there).

To me this framing of the problem doesn't have a quick-fix solution which is actually a good sign. For a long time we have been seeing growing awareness of "diversity problems" but too often people were quick to slap on a band-aid solution and call it resolved.

"We just need to encourage young girls to pick up coding", "we just need to make the language of our job ads more gender neutral so we don't scare off the women", "once we get more women in the door, they will naturally progress to higher levels and close the gender pay gap"...

..."oh and if that doesn't happen on its own that's just a sign that women need to learn to be more assertive, negotiate better, more like men".

Our "solutions" always seem to be focused on changing women to be more like men but why is the masculine our default? The real question isn't how do we force women to fit the current system but how do we change the system to unburden women so they can be themselves and thrive.

This is the book, for anyone interested. I highly recommend it. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41104077-invisible-women #womeningames #womenintech #gamedev