Some time ago I was introduced to the article “No Girls Allowed” by Tracey Lien. It looked at why video games were considered “for boys” and the cultural and economic forces behind that attitude.
The article is well worth reading, but a thing that stands out is that there’s one huge factor in this issue – and many issues of gender divides – and that’s Marketing and the audiences it choses to pursue. Lien focuses on the role of marketing in our lives – and in how it can affect attitudes about gender. She chooses the geeky area of video games to do it.
Games were deliberately marketed to a male audience years ago. Now today, this has become a social norm, a social assumption – and one you see in geek culture and in people’s discussions of geek culture.
We, the geeks, got “normed” by people trying to sell games.