The new data also reveals that 45% of Xbox owners and 41% of PS5 owners are female, too
This really shouldn’t be news and it certainly shouldn’t be surprising to anyone, but yes, new data from Circana shows that—as we told you in 2017—women play video games. In fact, more than half of all Switch owners are women. And a very vocal bunch of idiots are reacting about as well as you’d expect to this “revelation.”
That doesn’t really seem right to me, at least in the US. Most female gamers I know are either married (so any consoles would be joint owned) or play mobile games almost exclusively. Some play on PC, and very few play on any kind of console without being married. Or maybe they just don’t talk about it like men do.
If that’s accurate, I think it’s awesome! I’m more interested in methodology though. I’d love for this to be true since it means we’ve finally destroyed the stigma against women playing video games.
The methodology is discussed in the article.
[Here] (https://twitter.com/MatPiscatella/status/1667215771423105029) is a tweet embedded in the article that explains how the data was collected.
While reflecting on our personal experience is useful it is important to acknowledge that our experiences are anecdotal and do not necessarily demonstrate truth.
The methodology is merely touched on, and that link gives very little information. According to this thread, it seems it’s an online survey, and it’s not clear where or how this survey was fielded. N is certainly large enough, but that doesn’t matter if the survey was posted to communities with a disproportionate female audience. The screenshot from YouGov in that chain is closer to my experience, but as you rightly implied, anecdotes aren’t data.
So I’d like a bit more transparency here.
That said, maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe saying ~50% of gamers are women is enough for women to actually get to that figure. I certainly would appreciate more women playing games, and I know my wife would as well since her gaming communities still seems to be largely male dominated (her guild has a number of women, but not 50%).
Most gamers you know are married, but most gamers I know are not. Less people are getting married overall, so it statistically could make sense. Also, I’ve found that among my married friends, those who game tend to prerer different kinds of games. For instance I have a friend who PC games but her husband only plays the xbox. So the data probably has variations of that.