I kicked off a new project today, and though I couldn’t put my finger on it, something in the leads meeting felt odd.

On the project I just finished, I had a female production manager, lead programmer, lead animator and art director. We got on swimmingly, like I don’t think I’ve ever gotten along with a group of women before. There’s something about dames who game that’s different from other women. They’ve usually had traditionally masculine interests their whole lives, and are used to being mostly male environments. They each had a beautiful confidence and strength to them, whilst each being all woman, and I adored them for it. After a lifetime of sharing interests only with boys, and feeling a little self-conscious around girls about my enthusiasm for sci-fi and comic books, I revelled in finally finding sisters who had had the same experience. Jokes floated about how our team got priority service from the tools and IT groups because of the pheromone factor, but I didn’t care. I was proud to head such a demographical oddity in the company. I was proud to work for a company where such a team existed.

We’ve tried to keep the team together, but many of those fabulous ladies are now moving on to other things, having been promoted to head their own projects or simply being a better fit on other projects. And I realized that the odd thing about the new leads meeting was that there were now only two of us women at the table.

It may in turn be odd to be surprised at finding myself with a mostly male team… in games development. After all, nothing should be more normal. But I’m happy to have had the chance to take the abnormal for granted for a while.
(PS. That being said, everyone on the team rawks anyway. You know I love you gamer boys too).