> Heini Kaihu: The core team is 13 people out of which 3 are women. How many people worked on the Angry Birds Stella game in total? How many women? How many men? Even though the latter is hugely important, the first factor easily gets overlooked, and in my opinion it is in most cases even more critical to support and build career paths for talented young female who enter the industry. > Heini Kaihu: In my opinion and personal experience, two biggest factors here are both fully supporting you in your current role work and related career ambitions, and at the same time giving you tools to balance your work and personal life so that you don’t have to choose between career and family. What extra steps does Rovio want to take to make female employees feel at home in their company, going forward? Nokia has trained a lot of great female QA and project management talent. A lot of talent also comes in through our own networks, and other companies e.g. Whereas men usually have their background, experience and own interest in more hard core gaming. As part of the fit is also candidate’s own interest and experience in the social & casual gaming area, where women actually stand out. > Heini Kaihu: In terms of who do we hire, we always go for the best talent and fit for the position, regardless of the gender. What practical steps were/are taken to increase the ratio of women employees in the company overall, and in usually under-represented categories such as for example development? game development positions is greater among Finnish applicants than those coming from abroad. the first chair of IGDA Finland and the current vice chair are women) This is also seen from the job applications, the ratio of women applying to e.g. Maybe there is also something in the gender neutrality of the ICT industry that has resulted in the Finnish gaming and start-up scene to be very natural places for women (e.g. Also the fact that as an entertainment company, we do have departments where women employment is traditionally more common, and then the internal job rotation makes it easy for female talent also to switch to games area. Our inclusiveness towards women can also be due to our focus as a games company being the mobile casual games. If we make games with the female audience in mind, it makes sense to have people from that target group participating in the game development. > Heini Kaihu: To be honest, I see it is only common business sense. Is this a conscious thing? How did it start? When glancing a round offices in the Helsinki headquarter, Rovio seems to be more inclusive towards women than it is the norm in our industry. To try and find out, I recently took the chance to interview Heini Kaihu, Head of Studio at Rovio and Project Lead on Angry Birds Stella. Earlier this month, Rovio launched their Angry Birds Stella spin-off, which is all about female heroism. When I visited Rovio headquarters in Finland, I was struck by the surprisingly high number of female executives in charge at key decisive positions over there.
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