RIYADH: At the recent Next World Forum in Riyadh, the largest esports and gaming conference worldwide, industry leaders and experts noted that Saudi Arabia has a more gender-diverse sector compared to its US counterpart. Jessica Tams, the CEO of Seven Falls, participated in a panel discussion featuring prominent female personalities in the esports industry, including Holly Liu of PKO Investments, investor Boyoung Kim, and adviser and investor Fan Shen. The panel, “Breaking the Code: The Challenges for Women in Gaming Leadership,” explored female success in a male-dominated world as well as the significant challenges women faced, such as fighting stereotypes and making difficult career decisions. The US average of women in the gaming industry is typically 20 percent, Liu said. Using those statistics, Saudi Arabia supersedes that number across its game development studios, Tams said during the panel.  “Hopefully that will stay … because of the programs from the government and training, and because they are gender-blind, when they’re coming up, and they’re very data-driven, it’s enabled a lot of women to come up and have jobs,” Tams said.  They drew an example from one of Saudi Arabia’s most prominent game development companies.  Tams said: “I’ve noticed most of the companies in the gaming space are doing well, because having a diverse company makes better products. The companies that are very toxic, luckily are not producing this product for us. You can see a great example, actually, here in the Kingdom with Manga Productions, where they have over 60 percent women on staff.” “They have programs for youth where they funnel them up, send them off to Japan and the US to get trained, and bring them back. They’ve noticed that a lot of the people that are coming back, because they’re so highly qualified, are actually women.” In the US, finding women leaders in the industry is difficult. Griffin Gaming Partners attempted to track the number of female co-founder companies over the past year — but that wasn’t enough, Kim said. The numbers stayed stagnant and low, quarter after quarter, and it became a challenge to actively increase outbound activities to seek out those female founders. Kim explained that the process involves “intentionally seeking out those opportunities. Same thing for recruiting: we took a data-driven approach, and noticed that there simply wasn’t enough coming down the pipeline from the initial application submission stage.  “So, what we had to do was reach out to candidates with experiences that we’re looking for, or adjacent experiences if it had to be, and once they came through the interviewer pipeline, really training them, spending extra time giving them the unfair advantage — because they have an unfair playground when they join.”  A study conducted by the University of California Los Angeles showed that women are more inclined to voice their opinions when there is a representation of at least 30 percent or more women in the room. One major barrier for women in the gaming industry is the male-dominated company cultures, pay gaps, and lack of belonging as minorities. Women leaders are taking action by actively including women in the field, providing safe spaces for their growth, promoting themselves and other women, and creating opportunities. It is important to incorporate women into corporate and decision-making spaces, as diverse leadership teams lead to greater innovation, growth and creativity. “I think it’s very important for any company to realize that because females, right now, fall in a lot more economic power. Having female employees in leadership to really capture that is really beneficial for the business,” Shen said.