Digital Flash NYC, a marketing agency, recently published a handy infographic reinforcing what we already know: women are more active users of social networking sites than men, racking up 99m more visits than men every month. Buried among the stats revealing that 58% of Facebook users and 64% of Twitter users are female was one forcing us to give up lazy preconceptions of gamers as sweaty teenagers hunched over laptops in bedrooms, and older women as sad loners, shovelling in the oven chips while glumly watching the household budget disappear on bingo sites.
Not only are women of all ages moving in on gaming, but the report also found women over the age of 55 spend more time playing online games than males aged 15 to 24 and males 25 to 34 combined. We shouldn't be so surprised. Women over 45 were also there when Space Invaders first trundled into arcades in the 70s, when home computing became affordable with the ZX Spectrum in the 80s, and in the current day, when a raft of consoles and devices such as smartphones and tablets have made gaming easier and more sociable.
Helen Sheridan, 47, says her love for gaming began with Space Invaders and Pac-Man, which she still plays today. She enjoys RPG (role-playing games) the most, especially Fable 3. "For me it's about challenge and escapism, entering a different world where you can dictate the rules," she says.
She says her enthusiasm of gaming has waxed and waned – picking up when she had a baby that wouldn't sleep, "I bought a Mega Drive", dropping off for a couple of years and then reviving as she played games with her daughter. In recent years she discovered game conventions.
Sheridan is an avid gamer and the way she talks about it makes me want to buy tickets for the Manchester Play Expo event in October, where she says not only will I see families pouring over the latest releases but husbands trying to pull their wives away, and being told to clear off, get on with the shopping and leave them to it. What surprises me is the astonishment that so many women over 45 "get" technology. Yes we do. And we're not just sticking family pictures up on Facebook or following Stephen Fry on Twitter, either. We've developed strong online business strategies, networked and built fresh professional relationships over social media and harnessed the web to greater effect than our male counterparts. Research shows that, while men sit back and look at what is on Facebook, it is the women who are the actual drivers, populating the content.
Of the phones bought last year by the over-55s, 40% were smartphones, yet why is it that the over-50s, who hold 80% of the nation's wealth and have a higher disposable income than the under-50s, are constantly portrayed as yearning for no more than a bag of Werther's Original and a good sit down?
As a 57-year-old, I'd like to flag up to the tech marketing industry, and indeed journalists reflecting on statistics, that I don't regard myself as being past it. I have been and will continue to be an early adopter. I had a mobile and indeed a computer before any of my male co-presenters or producers on Tomorrow's World, recognised the usefulness of social media before my bosses and have benefited enormously from the connectivity and collaborative potential of the web.
However, Sheridan puts her finger on a much larger issue when she flags up one area of dissatisfaction. "I feel I am a strong woman, so I don't go for games targeted by men at a female audience they perceive to be feminine, girlie and pink. I enjoy playing a female character, so long as the character is still in the same vein as the male characters. I prefer to be an army general, rather than long-legged, pert-breasted and in skimpy clothes." Fable 3 and Gears of War 3 (the story was written by a woman) tick the box.
Women are under-represented in the IT industry and certainly in the gaming industry, where only 6-7% of game programmers are women.
Game enthusiast and reporter Kate Russell says that consumers and the industry are missing out. "More balanced gender splits on game development teams would mean even more games that appeal to both men and women," she says.
At one of our recent TeenTech events in Hull, we ran a great session with Bafta, encouraging teenagers to design and build games. Before we started, I asked the 300 teenagers to draw an engineer or technologist. Just 26 drew women. And one drawing, showing the stereotypical bloke with wild hair, glasses and a white coat, was annotated: "Beards are compulsory for scientists."
It's a damaging and persistent stereotype. Women are using the web to great effect, but we need to keep raising the profile of those who are building and creating technology to help more young women realise that this is a place where they can thrive professionally as well as personally. And then games for women will no longer be pink.