page_title: Women and video games
hierarchical_section_title: Women and video games
caption_attribution_description: Girls playing video games in local gaming hall in Japan. Taken by Ningyou.
context_page_description: The relationship between women and video games has received extensive academic and media attention. Since the 1990s, female gamers have commonly been regarded as a minority, but industry surveys have shown that over time, the gender ratio has become closer to equal, and since the 2010s, women have been found to make up around half of all gamers. Sexism in video gaming, including sexual harassment, as well as underrepresentation of women as characters in games, is an increasing topic of discussion in video game culture.
  Advocates for increasing the number of female gamers stress the problems attending disenfranchisement of women from one of the fastest-growing cultural realms as well as the largely untapped nature of the female gamer market. Efforts to include greater female participation in the medium have addressed the problems of gendered advertising, social stereotyping, and the lack of female video game creators. The term "girl gamer" has been used as a reappropriated term for female players to describe themselves, but it has also been criticized as counterproductive or offensive.
context_section_description: The relationship between women and video games has received extensive academic and media attention. Since the 1990s, female gamers have commonly been regarded as a minority, but industry surveys have shown that over time, the gender ratio has become closer to equal, and since the 2010s, women have been found to make up around half of all gamers. Sexism in video gaming, including sexual harassment, as well as underrepresentation of women as characters in games, is an increasing topic of discussion in video game culture.
  Advocates for increasing the number of female gamers stress the problems attending disenfranchisement of women from one of the fastest-growing cultural realms as well as the largely untapped nature of the female gamer market. Efforts to include greater female participation in the medium have addressed the problems of gendered advertising, social stereotyping, and the lack of female video game creators (coders, developers, producers, etc.). The term "girl gamer" has been used as a reappropriated term for female players to describe themselves, but it has also been criticized as counterproductive or offensive.
caption: Women playing The House of the Dead III in an amusement arcade in Japan, 2005
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