Gender Bias in Video Game Dialogue

A study led by Stephanie Rennick at the University of Stirling and Seán Roberts at Cardiff University performed the first large-scale test of gender imbalance in the dialogue of 50 role-playing games. It discovered that games include nearly twice as much male dialogue as female dialogue on average.

Main Findings

• 35% of words were spoken by female characters.
• 29% of characters were female, which suggests the imbalance is driven by a lack of female characters.
• 94% of games had more male dialogue than female dialogue.

You can read an accessible summary at The Conversation, see the press release, or find the full paper here.