Girls Make Games: the organisation showing young girls another career

The cycle of young girls playing video games often follows a similar arc: they start playing when they’re younger, then drop off as they get older, and by the time they’re adults, they’ve almost forgotten about the fun they had when they were younger. This is what happened to Laila Shabir, who even though she loved sneaking out to arcades with her sister in the United Arab Emirates when she was growing up, had forgotten all about gaming until she moved to the US to study at MIT and met her husband. “He was a pretty serious gamer and loved both making and playing games,” she tells the Standard. “He opened my eyes to this new way of influencing kids and changing perceptions through entertainment. And one of the best ways to do that is through video games.” Together they started LearnDistrict, a games studio focusing on educational games for children. And this is where they ran into their first barrier: it was really hard to recruit women. “When we were recruiting, the applications we got were 90 per cent men and 10 per cent women. That was really shocking,” says Shabir. “I was head of the studio and I figured if… Read full this story

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