Girls Who Code launches the Girls Who Code Girls project

The nonprofit organization aims to balance the culture and gender gap within the video game community.
Diverse female characters over the Girls Who Code Girls logo

Girls Who Code has announced the launch of an initiative named Girls Who Code Girls, a gaming experience that enables girls to create individualized video game characters using coding. The company will partner with Mojo Supermarket for this project.

According to Girls Who Code, diversity awareness is the key to this project. The nonprofit organization stated that 77% of video game developers are men, and only 20% of all characters are women.

The imbalance between male and female developers causes all gamers to experience more female characters from a male perspective, as Girls Who Code finds that some characters might be misrepresented. The company seeks to bring a sense of equilibrium to the gender and culture gap among developers, which will allow more gamers to feel accurately represented in games.

Tarika Barrett, CEO of Girls Who Code, made comments about the digital experience:

“Though almost half of all gamers are women, we don’t see them represented in game development. As a result, what we do see is a gaming experience catered to the white, male gaze that alienates some of its most passionate and diverse fans.”

“That’s why we created Girls Who Code Girls. By turning users into creators, we’re empowering our community to use coding to upend the status quo and imagine a future where they can harness their passion and creativity into a career in tech. We want our students to know that they deserve to take up space in gaming and game development; and can create characters that reflect the best parts of who they are.”

Kate Carter, Group Creative Director at Mojo Supermarket, added:

“With Girls Who Code Girls, we set out to accomplish two goals. First, provide girls and young women with a fun, creative entry point to trying out code. And second, to draw attention to the fact that if more women coded video game characters, they would look more like real women. Our ambition is that with every line of code you type, you can influence the future of women in gaming.”

“We saw how much girls enjoyed DojaCode as an interactive experience, so we wanted to give them another fun one while showing the world and gaming companies why it’s so important that we invest in getting more young women into the tech and gaming fields.”

With this digital coding platform, the company looks to provide a fun experience for women who wish to code and show that more women in coding would lead to female characters being accurately represented in games. The nonprofit stated that the created characters will be licensable and can be offered to game companies.

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