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Posted in: Games | Tagged: female protagonists, gaming
Gendercrunching: Gaming Has Fewer Female Protagonists Than 5 Years Ago
Verve Search Ltd has researched more than2,500 video game releases over the last five years (2016-2020) to find out how representation in terms of female protagonists has changed over time. It is not the direction one may expect. The research for Buzz Bingo shows that less than 1 in 10 games released in 2020 features a female protagonist, but this is down on 2016.
Specifically, only 9.2% of all game releases in 2020 feature a female protagonist – the lowest proportion in five years. In comparison, game protagonists in our analysis were three times more likely to be male. In no year did more than 11.4% of games feature one, while 30.6% of all games released since 2016 featured a male protagonist. The Xbox platform featured the lowest since 2016, with 7.1% featuring a female protagonist. IOS is the platform with the highest representation, half the male number at 12.7% vs 25.9%.
While sports games have the lowest proportion of out of all genres, 1.2%, while mostly focusing on male sporting games. The adventure genre has the highest proportion of female protagonists, at 22%. But all games genres, except for simulation games, have more male protagonist-led releases than female.
There has, however, been a steady increase in the proportion of games where the player has multiple gender options – rising from 32.6 to 47.6%. Here are the stats:
| Year | % Female Protagonist | % Male Protagonist | % Multiple Options | % Ambiguous | % NA |
| 2016 | 10.9% | 29.5% | 32.6% | 7.2% | 19.8% |
| 2017 | 15.1% | 27.1% | 38.3% | 6.5% | 13% |
| 2018 | 10% | 32% | 36.5% | 3.3% | 18.2% |
| 2019 | 10.2% | 36.3% | 39.5% | 7.9% | 6.1% |
| 2020 | 9.2% | 26.5% | 47.6% | 8.1% | 8.6% |
| Platform | % Female Protagonist | % Male Protagonist | % Multiple Options | % Ambiguous | % NA |
| Nintendo Switch | 11% | 29.6% | 42.8% | 4% | 12.6% |
| PS4 | 10.3% | 35% | 37.7% | 5.4% | 11.6% |
| Xbox | 7.1% | 36.3% | 39.6% | 4.6% | 12.4% |
| Microsoft | 11.8% | 31.6% | 36.1% | 7.1% | 13.4% |
| IOS | 12.7% | 25.9% | 37.1% | 7.6% | 16.8% |
Out of 2,536 released titles over five years, the researchers assigned games with options of female, male , multiple options, ambiguous or NA. Female and male protagonists were only assigned when there was only the option to play as either a male or a female, not both, and defaults were ignored. Ambiguous protagonists are those that are not explicitly presented as male or female, while NA denotes a game where there is no discernible protagonist that can be assigned a gender, such as a city-building game. For titles with an ensemble cast, gender was researched for all playable characters.
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