Today's Los Angeles Times reports:

The video game industry is flourishing, especially in California, as sales continue to climb despite a faltering economy. But the hiring has largely bypassed women. They comprise fewer than 1 in 5 workers in the business, according to a 2007 survey by Game Developer Magazine. Among game programmers, the number is a paltry 3%.

This makes sense because game programmers are drawn from the pool of game players, who are overwhelmingly male.

Is it that women don't like to play electronic games? Are the girls unable to master virtual worlds? Do females lack a sense of fun, the instincts to hunt and track and kill?

Sorry. The answer is much more mundane than any such concept. The fact is, women and girls do not have the leisure time to spend immersed in an exotic virtual world with its specialized characters, intricate rules and highly evolved play "spaces."

Anyone who has played one of the games can tell you how many hours he spent just building the attributes of his character and learning to parse the rules.

Most women are lucky to get a free hour away from earning a living, doing the dishes, taking out the trash, washing the clothes and putting them away, buying groceries, planning and cooking meals...need I continue? An hour stolen from these necessities would be barely enough to boot the computer, load the program and set up the next scenario. At the end of the hour, when it's time to take dinner out of the oven, the player has just begun and she now has to exit.

Hence my contention that women don't play computer games much because they do not have the same large blocks of leisure time that men have. Quelle dommage!

Note: There was a time when I gave up sleep to game all night, but I found that all-nighters seriously interfered with my ability to be coherent during the day. Or even just stay awake.