Women now rule the world...of casual gaming. Hey, it's still a start, and certainly worthy of a world dominating villain laugh. Mwahahahahah! So just how involved are women in the casual game industry, and why is that exactly?

From the article:

Parks Associates' Michael Cai began with some charts. According to the data, female gamers heavily prefer computers to consoles: female gamers spend an average of 70% of their gaming time on computers, versus male gamers' 56%. Female gamers make up 62% of the casual game audience, and this group, especially those age 13-17, play more sessions per month. There is less diversity among genres for female gamers as well: across age groups, puzzle and card games are the most popular casual games.

Sharon Wienbar from investing firm Scale Venture Partners led the discussion. John Welch, CEO of PlayFirst, revealed that 90% of the purchasers for his company's Diner Dash are female. Jane Pinckard, business development analyst for Foundation 9 Entertainment, categorized her company as mostly male-targeted, but with an eye toward developing more casual, female-focused games. The final panelist, Kongregate's CEO Jim Greer, said that his site is populated by about 85% male users.

The panelists then discussed the proportion of women in their companies: PlayFirst's 26% female design team (including designers and producers) is "probably 3 times" the norm, while on the other end Foundation 9 is about "90% male" with some women in things like art and UI design, according to Pinckard. An attendee asked if the lack of women in programming positions created a disconnect with the game design. Pinckard didn't see a problem for people on teams, but offered that independent designers with no programming experience may have difficulty due to the lack of simple game-design engines.

Read the full article over at joystiq.com