IGDA’s Kate Edwards confronts Gamergate and diversity in gaming head-on

Kate Edwards, the executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), isn’t shy. She took on the issues around Gamergate, the gamer rage controversy that started last August, in a fireside chat last week at the GamesBeat Summit. She said she was frustrated about the length of time it has taken for this issue to come to the fore: there just aren’t enough women in the game industry. But she also said that the silver lining of the Gamergate controversy was that it prompted Intel to take action. The world’s biggest chip maker announced in January that it would spend $300 million to address diversity issues in tech and gaming, and it plans to double the percentage of women developers from 20 percent to 40 percent in the next decade.

While on stage, Edwards took an interesting question from Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. Bushnell wondered how to fix the problem of the lack of women in leadership in games when there were so few women and girls in the pipeline for technical careers. Sexism was the second-biggest issue in the most recent IGDA poll of industry perceptions among game developers. Only about 20 percent of the people in the game industry are women, and Intel wants to double that percentage in the next decade.