How female gamers learning about the video game industry will fight gender imbalance and sexism from within that community

“We encounter a lot of feedback from school students and parents,” said Jodie Azhar, lead technical artist on Total War: Warhammer, part of the studio’s flagship Total War series.

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“We want to address these misconceptions such as ‘it’s easier for men to find jobs than it is for women in this industry’ and ‘my mom tells me to get a real job.’”

With her rectangular glasses and red highlights, Azhar knows as a young female that she is an exception in Britain’s video game industry.

According to a 2016 study, women fill only 19 per cent of jobs, despite the fact that women make up half of British gamers.

“In that 19 per cent, how many of those women are actually making games?” asked Marie Claire Isaaman, president of the “Women in Games” group, which seeks to increase female representation.

“If I look to a range of other data, most women aren’t making games,” she added. “So you have all male team[s] developing female characters. That can be a big problem.”

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For Azhar, this shortage is primarily linked to education.

“I think the biggest issue with women getting in the industry comes from a school age,” she said.

“Although I loved playing video games, I didn’t realise that making them could be a professional career. At school, I never got told about theses jobs.”

Much of the disparity can be traced back to a supply shortage, with fewer girls choosing to study Stem (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects, according to Richard Wilson, head of the Independent Video Game Developers’ Association in Britain.

Studios “can actively go out and try to encourage more women to get a career in the video games industry”, he suggested.

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Part of the imbalance has also been ascribed to negative attitudes within the video game world, claims that boiled over in 2014 with the so-called “Gamergate” incident.

The row centred on accusations that journalists were artificially boosting games created by female developers, but soon took a dark turn with threats levelled against independent developer Zoe Quinn.

On the flip side, studios now appear less hesitant to cast women as main characters, such as in recent releases Horizon: Zero Dawn and Uncharted: The Lost Legacy.

In recent years, more and more women have also joined development teams.

And the sector is booming: the UK has more than 2,000 studios, employing around 13,000 people, and the industry grew by 7 per cent in 2017.

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The country boasts some of the industry’s most prestigious names, such as the Rockstar North studio in Scotland, creator of the Grand Theft Auto series, and London’s Rocksteady.

“Things are going in the right direction,” said Isaaman, who hopes that 40 per cent of the industry will be female by 2025.

Not surprisingly, Britain is seeking to be at the forefront of the global debate.

After all, it was near Derby in central England in 1996 that now-defunct studio Core Design gave birth to Lara Croft, one of the most iconic gamer characters of all time.