Women Used to Dominate Virtual Reality Development, But Seem All But Absent from the Industry Now

Jacki Morie in 1990

Vice has an interesting interview with Jacki Morie, a virtual reality pioneer who fears the VR industry is repeating mistakes made in the 90s. She expanded on another concern to Vice that she and I were recently discussing -- the lack of women in VR content development. Which wasn't always the case, but is so now:

... I did an in-depth survey where I tried to find artistic, meaningful, very creative virtual reality experiences. This didn't include a virtual kitchen you could walk around to design your kitchen, military training scenarios we designed for wayfinding, and more functional VR experiences. It was the very creative, multisensory things, with full immersion and interesting interfaces. The 100 creations I found between 1985 and 2006-2007, 70 percent of those creators were women... Oculus is running this Mobile VR Jam, and 1,700 people signed up for it. I went through all of them and found every name that was remotely female and my best guess estimate is that 6 percent were women.

Emphasis mine, because the contrast is gobsmacking. At the same time, I'm not surprised: At the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality conference last year, I'd estimate maybe 85-90% of the attendees were male. Now, it's true that that's not an atypical gender imbalance for a tech/gaming conference, but in the case of VR, that wasn't always so.

But what could the current VR industry do to reverse that trend?

"They'd have to start listening and being aware of what happened before," Jacki tells me. "It might open them up to including/seeking out women for their teams."

It'll probably take an even more proactive effort:

"Maybe like the initiative to have a woman on every [conference] panel," she suggests, "maybe VR teams should pledge to include a woman on each team. Because there are REALLY REALLY talented women out there - I'd also like to see more women led teams, like Nonny de la Pena's."

This gender imbalance, by the way, isn't just an American problem: "[E]ven at the premier European conference on media production, FMX, celebrating its 20th year," notes Morie, "only two women were to be found in the immersive media categories."

And if VR is going to become a mass market product as the industry intend, it's going to need input from everyone -- not just the myopic males who tend to dominate it now.  

Photo credit: All These Worlds. Please share this post:

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Comments

[Cyberserenity]

I just created my own hypergrid.
I am pretty sure women will be big contributers to the new virtual business. Communication skills are important.
Well i do not have them but many other women rules in that.

[melponeme_k]

Oculus is not VR. In fact it poses an obstacle to VR. It disassociates the VR player from the community inside VR and turns it into travelogue. What I see in the Oculus development is not the building of worlds but turning the user into a spectator. So that someone else, preferable a corporation, can build a world where the user will just spectate. Spectate in a nice orderly, controlled fashion.

It is ironic that the VR creators want a Ready Player One world but instead inject ever more controlling forms of corporatism into the VR arena.

Second Life is it. It has a community. It has worlds. It has women, most importantly, who are interested in creating communities. Women are the glue of culture in real life and in VR. Without us, there will be no worlds. There will only be backdrops, static nothing of repeated psychodramas particular to the male psyche. So get ready to play rounds of Call of Duty ad infinitum.