I never said I didn't care about it, only that it was a minor reason why the whole thing collapsed.
On that point, sexism is a minor problem in America. Plenty of Middle Eastern and African countries have far larger concerns.
Women are getting a majority of college degrees now, among non-married twentysomethings women earn more, and women are just doing better in school overall than men at every and all levels. So, women won. (And if you quote the completely discredited 77 cents statistic at me, uuuuuugggggh.)
It was not the only reason it failed for sure but it was one of the major ones, and it was the last straw to the total collapse of this project.
While it's cool that women are getting more degrees, women are still a minority in STEM careers. At only 29%, my university has the highest female enrollment in an engineering faculty in Canada, and the majority of those women are either in the first year or the major regarded as the easiest, civil engineering. It's the very little presence and the general stereotype that women are bad at tech, programming, and science in general that dissuade more women from getting involved in things they may enjoy. It's even more apparent with games and game development. Zoe Quinn, who was one of the women in this thing had a game greenlit on Steam and
she got a lot of backlash for it. Sure, it was more of a text RPG thing, but regardless, harassing her to the point where she had to change her number was undeserved. Jenny Haniver's website
Not in the Kitchen Anymore shows the sexist and rude comments she gets on a daily basis while playing games like CoD online. I've personally had people pass off my hard earned grades as 'sleeping with the prof', to my face no less. I've had people assume that my male lab partner does all the work when nothing could be further from the truth, we both put in an inhuman amount of effort into our work.
And I think this is the heart of the issue and why this has gotten so big. These women had the choice of 'take this guy's abuse and continue' or 'leave and risk reinforcing the stereotype that women cannot take the environment of game development' and they shouldn't have to feel that way.
This isn't anything radically ridiculous like Anita's videos in the other thread, and I'm not trying to say that I agree with all the feminist stuff(I've seen a lot of silly campaigns in the name of feminism on campus), but especially when it comes to STEM, I believe in this whole heartedly: women deserve respect in this field too and
no one should feel that their talents and skills are great in spite of something they can't control, like sex/gender or race.