I read it as "The point of having more women isn't to have more women, the point of having more women is to be able to make games women will like." This is a fairly common argument among people who suggest that diversity is something which should be actively aimed for.
I have never really found it persuasive, personally, although I like it a lot more than the quotas-for-quotas sake rationalization. Here's my beef: people are Ruby objects, not Java objects. They can have all sorts of weird behavior added at runtime that other instances of the same class don't have.
You could, for example, monkey patch an instance of Female on the fly with acts_as_fps_developer, or have an instance of Male which responds_to develop_product_for_female_audience. Moreover, this is not weird or unexpected in any way. So why would you assume that your ability to develop_product_for_female_audience increases linearly as the number of developers who are instances of Female increases?
Instance of: it's a code smell in Ruby, it's a code smell in hiring.
(Yeah yeah, I know, Java can do dependency injection these days. It's a metaphor, deal.)
The problem with stereotypes being excluded is you also tend to exclude people outside that stereotype who think that way. The Sims is a great game for the "Girl" demographic "Barby Dress up" not so much. The problem with "Barby Dress up" style games is you can't do the play acting that most girls do when playing with dolls. It completely misses the point for people of both genders who play with dolls and or action figures.
The Sims on the other hand let's people roll play real life while expanding on the core idea to make it even more fun.
PS: Growing up my little sister liked, Pet's, and Roller Coaster Tycoon, and some RPG's. But, at 18 she completely stooped gaming. Some of that is time constants but mostly it's sitting out of the target audience of most gaming companies.
I have never really found it persuasive, personally, although I like it a lot more than the quotas-for-quotas sake rationalization. Here's my beef: people are Ruby objects, not Java objects. They can have all sorts of weird behavior added at runtime that other instances of the same class don't have.
You could, for example, monkey patch an instance of Female on the fly with acts_as_fps_developer, or have an instance of Male which responds_to develop_product_for_female_audience. Moreover, this is not weird or unexpected in any way. So why would you assume that your ability to develop_product_for_female_audience increases linearly as the number of developers who are instances of Female increases?
Instance of: it's a code smell in Ruby, it's a code smell in hiring.
(Yeah yeah, I know, Java can do dependency injection these days. It's a metaphor, deal.)