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The gender gap in gaming (and how to fix it)

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 3 min

Mariya Yao is a mobile product designer and founder of Xanadu.

When you think of typical gamers, you probably conjure up the image of hordes of teenage boys holed up in a basement, staring blanking at a TV screen for hours on end. If this is the case, you’re dead wrong about the gamer population. Turns out women make up almost half of the gaming audience – 47 percent in 2012 – and there are far more female gamers over the age of 18 than there are male gamers under the age of 17.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.