[#dataviz] Are video games sexist?

With nearly 2 billion players worldwide, the video game industry is a heavyweight in the entertainment sector. The portrayal of men and women as characters - whether playable, speaking or interacting - is therefore a subject worthy of attention. Addressing the issue of gender balance is no easy task, and requires vast amounts of data and analysis.

Guergana Guintcheva and Hager Jemel-Fornetty (EDHEC) have been working for years on gender in video games as part of EDHEC’s Diversity & Inclusion Chair. They analysed dozens of games (released between 1988 and 2024), featuring thousands of characters and hundreds of thousands of lines of dialogue and spoken words, in order to document this issue in detail.

Their latest findings are striking, with fewer than 2% of titles achieving gender parity. 

Discover the key points of their work in this data visualisation, produced in collaboration with Datagora.

• Download the pdf version in English of this #dataviz (available soon in French)
• Browse it directly below
• Visit G. Guintecheva’s page or H. Jemel Fornetty's page on edhec.edu