1Up - Women's Work

1UP has a feature article up looking at the careers of some of the female developers in the industry, including a section from Brenda Brathwaite, whom some of you may remember from the Wizardry games and her later forays into 'adult' gaming. Here's a bit from the intro:

Since the beginning, the game industry's been about personalities. Richard Garriott. John Romero. Shigeru Miyamoto. Maybe because the medium itself can be so sterile and technical sometimes -- all ones and zeros, physics engines, inventories, and stat bars -- we gravitate toward the human faces for a dose of context and reality.

"We tend to make icons in all kinds of places," says game designer Brenda Brathwaite, who's worked on the Wizardry series, Jagged Alliance, and Playboy: The Mansion. "Sid Meier. American McGee. Peter Molyneux. Those types of people, they become more legendary, in some respects, than the games they're working on."

But what if the celebrity developer in question is a woman? Gender's still an incredibly thorny issue in the industry, and while game studios are hiring more women than ever, the male-to-female ratio is still markedly uneven. According to 2005 report by the International Game Developers Association, women represent just 11.5 percent of the game-development workforce. (Of course, it's a similar story in many technical fields: women make up less than 30 percent of IT professionals and just 14 percent of engineers.)

But according to some prominent industry women, things aren't quite as bad as they seem. In fact, some say there's never been a better time to be a woman in game development.