I was in a pub one Sunday afternoon a year or so ago. I was enjoying a pint or two and watching a football match on the telly when a woman entered the bar. There was nothing unusual about this, well not at this point anyway, but then I heard the woman say; “This pub is full of men, I haven’t been in a pub like this for years“. At this point I turned away from the telly and duly noted that the pub was indeed, full of men and that the newly arrived woman was indeed the only woman on the customer side of the bar. There were women behind the bar, men work behind the bar too. I should note here that the pub is not usually as male dominated as it was that day and that plenty of women attend the pub quite happily.
The thing was, it wasn’t until this woman had arrived in the pub and made her comment that I realised that the pub was full of men. I was reminded of this incident whilst reading a post by Hamlet Au over at New World Notes; How to Really Get More Women into VR: More VR Startups Founded & Run by Women. The post links to an article over at Digital LA; Women in VR: 26 Ways to Increase Women in VR.
A few points really stand out to me in terms of visibility :
Attend VR events such as VRLA Expo, Oculus Connect, and more to learn, connect, represent and increase visibility of women in VR.
Create documentary of leading women pioneers in VR. There are many women pioneers in VR who can be role models to girls or others who want to get into VR. The documentary film can be screened at VR events.
Create great content. Women need to start creating their own VR content. “I’m going to start creating my own content in addition to working on projects for others,” said Shannon Gans, founder of New Deal Studios which won the Oscar for Interstellar.
Get YouTubers, Viners and other influencers into VR. If top female influencers across various platforms started to do VR, that would increase women interest in VR. If iJustine (YouTube), Brittany Furlan (Vine), Amanda Oleander (Periscope) were invited to do a VR experience, that would be widely shared among their audiences and drive interest in VR.
That visibility is important and another factor to note is conformity, which leads me to another article featuring VR researcher Jenny Wu; Jenny Wu: VR researcher. Psychology grad. Social media dissenter.
Jenny Wu along with Dr. Philipp Kraemer carried out research into conformity in virtual worlds, to see if similar patterns emerge to those that do in the physical world :
They decided to work together to replicate a classic social phenomenon about conformity. The 1951 study by Asch showed that in groups of three or more people who express a specific idea, subjects were likely to conform, even if they knew the idea was wrong. Wu and Kraemer used avatars in a virtual environment to show the same thing. “Even without other people physically present,” Wu said, there was still pressure to go with the group. “It was a cross between social psychology and the tech stuff,” Wu said, “but it was basically a social psych experiment.” It hooked her.
Now if people think that you need to represent yourself as male to get on in VR, then that’s not very encouraging in terms of a diverse future. I should note here that this isn’t a conclusion from the research I’m referring to above, I’m just making a tenuous link. However it’s interesting that people, even in a virtual setting, will conform.
However, as many of us know, Second Life, a virtual world of some note, has a strong female presence when compared to other 3D online spaces. One of the reasons for this, I will speculate, is that there have over the years been strong visible female presences amongst staff and residents.
We’ve seen strong leaders such as Robin Harper and Cyn Skyberg in very prominent positions within Linden Lab. Mileage will vary regarding some of the names I mention but we’ve seen strong representations from people such as Jeska Linden, Courtney Linden, Pink Linden, Bridie Linden, Xiola Linden, Alexa Linden, Brooke Linden and many more.
Anshe Chung is one of the most well known residents on the customer side, making front page headlines. I’ve spoken to the likes of Paisley Beebe who at one time had her own inworld chat show, Marsha Warwillow who runs her own magazine at SL Goth and further afield into the world of OpenSim, author Nara Malone amongst others.
Then there are prominent bloggers such as Inara Pey and Nalates Urriah. There’s a danger of getting patronising here, “Oh look, there’s a woman“, does get patronising, but my point is that there are plenty of women in and around virtual worlds and virtual reality, but there are without a doubt gender biases that put women off engaging with these technologies too.
I don’t buy the idea that there’s an evil cabal of men, quite probably sitting in a gentleman’s club in London. These men wear top hats, spectacles, capes, drink port or sherry, smoke cigars and discuss how to get around the world in 80 days and then in between that, they plot how to keep women out of technology circles. However the statistics don’t lie and the number of women in technology and virtual reality is on the whole smaller than it could be.
The reasons for this have been discussed by people far more qualified than me to discuss them and hopefully those discussions will continue in a constructive fashion but I can’t help feeling that one of the reasons for lower participation from females is at times they encounter the situation I described at the start of this post regarding the woman entering the pub full of men. One of the major problems there being that far too many men don’t recognise that scenario even exists in the first place.