Motherhood in the Game Industry

[Music] thank you my name is Jen Marie Owens I'm the head of operations for Phoenix Labs we make a game called dauntless I've been with the company since we found it back in 2014 having started my career about 15 years ago at BioWare and then moving to Canada after that I have been under herder as long as I can remember and along the way I also got to become a baby herder I have a nine and a half year old and a six-year-old and Phoenix Labs is my middle child and so we wanted to come bring these this group of folks together today to talk about the challenges of being mothers in the games industry when you are a minority within a minority so we've brought together four great panelists to talk to you today about their experiences I'll go through and introduce them first then we'll go into our discussion questions and then there will be time for Q a at the end we were thinking

we'll stop at about quarter two so if you do have a question feel free to line up at that time and we'd love to answer your questions so our first panelist is Latoya Peterson she is our newest panelist to games prior to that where she is a co-founder of glow up games she's the cxo there and prior to that she worked in news at places like ESPN and Al Jazeera she also has the youngest child on our panel uh with a six-month-old and we're grateful that she was able to join us despite that today she also has an eight-year-old Jenny Lee's made the longest trip to join us today from our panel coming over from Brighton England where she works at boss alien oh thanks yeah I'm super pro so far sailing where she leads engineer hearing on Star Wars Hunters prior to that she was Stateside in La working at Riot games and has one daughter who is about two years old Georgina is our Canadian panelist coming

down from Vancouver like myself she started in her career in games as a programmer and over the last Escape has grown through many leadership roles currently serves as the principal producer of core technology at Relic which is what the slide says if I change it and her kids are 9 and 12 and it gives us the rest of us a lot of hope that things do actually get better along the way and lastly Charlene liskoff who is the senior concept artist with me at Phoenix labs and the reason that today's panel exists she had The Bravery to stand up and say I think this is something that we should talk about more but I'm not sure what the right format is when she's not coming up with amazing GDC topics she or drawing beautiful pictures she's keeping up with her two and four-year-old boys before we continue I just wanted to really acknowledge that throughout this presentation we are going to use terms like Motherhood maternity leave and woman because those are the lived experiences that we are able to represent we understand that these

issues affect a lot of groups of people outside of women and people who identify as female and that that a lot of single dads also struggle with some of these types of Industry issues but for us to speak of our lived experiences we want to use the words that are correct for us so that is what you will hear us referring to there are a lot of groups that could benefit from some of the adaptations and improvements that we're going to talk about today and in general most things in advocacy when we improve things for one group we improve things for all groups so as context setting I'll let each of the panelists give you a small summary of what their maternity leave experience and return to work has been has been as we come from a lot of different countries and experiences and that context really affects the way that our motherhood experiences have happened and the challenges that we've faced so we'll start with Charlotte so I had two maternity leave so the first one was uh in a

in 2017 and my second one was right at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020 and so both of my maternity leaves uh lasted uh four months and a half so being in the US I was I was able to accumulate the maternity from blizzard because I was at Blizzard at that time maternity leave from California state short-term disability and long-term disability and so during my first maternity leave my husband because of visual Visa issues was not allowed to work so basically after I came back to work he stayed with my older one which was incredibly incredibly helpful and for my second maternity leave when I came back to work it was way more challenging because we wear uh in summer 2020 it was we were

right at the middle of the pandemic so all the daycares were closed everybody had to work from home uh plus because California there were fires everywhere and so we had absolutely no Escape my husband had found a work at that time so just picture that we were two parents working in the living room with two young kids with all the playgrounds closed all the daycare closed and it was one of the most stressful year in my life thankfully now it's way better I'm working from home but my kids are both at school and daycare so now it's way more Balanced Life Life for sure I think you may have developed the patience of a saint through that year Georgina how about you yeah hi everyone um nice to see all of you here it's uh wonderful that you've come and to see

you in person so for my story um I started out in the games industry as a programmer I worked out as a programmer a lead programmer and then a technical project manager when I had my daughter um and I was at radical entertainment which is a Activision Studio at that time so when I had her I took a year off for maternity leave so in Canada at the time a year was the maximum you could take it's actually 18 months now that you can take from maternity leave which is guaranteed by the the government in terms of your uh securing your job so I took a year off with her during my maternity leave Activision actually laid off half of the studio my team was intact so I wasn't laid off and then I came back to work on um it was Prototype that I was working on before and I came back to work on a game called prototype 2. and about a year in some gaming Executives and people from radical founded a visual effects startup

and I went to join them so I kind of left gaming into Tech and I had been thinking about leaving gaming for a while and some of those were personal reasons some of them were about just the the condition editions of the the work environment that that gaming has so I went and joined that VFX startup about a year later I had my son also took a year off for maternity leave uh went back I ended up spending uh eight years outside of games and then um joined games again about two and a half years ago at Relic entertainment thanks Latoya cool uh before I start so hi I'm Latoya Peterson co-founder of globe games matu kandaker my other fantastic phone Founders right here I'd like to acknowledge the often invisible labor that allows us to come and do these types of things so over in the corner in the yellow is Chiquita from kittycorp and so GDC actually provides child care she's holding my seven month old son Gabe and they are a part of this

as well to allow us to be on stage frequently this is labor of women and frequently women of color so just want to acknowledge that in terms of my maternity leave story so the first son that I have my son Gavin who's pictured here who's eight I was working in news which is very 24 hours a lot of very high pressure environment and I had the standard American maternity leave which is four months and there is no guaranteed maternity leave in America it's not a thing that in the United States I should say it's not a thing that is mandated you normally get 12 unpaid weeks and that's all that you're mandated so that was fairly generous considering it's interesting when I hear my colleagues on the panel be like oh yeah a year or two years not a thing that can happen and at that time my husband was lead parent and so he ended up leaving his job and staying home with Gavin for the first three years which really allowed me to continue to excel in my career he was the one that took the caretaking penalty so that I didn't have to um this time around things have been a little bit different my husband having taken that care taking penalty uh was now at work and you know in a career that he enjoyed and so I did a lot more

of the juggling this time around and we were also co-founding a studio at a very crucial point where we were about to launch and put our game into uh position for the first time so I'll talk about that a little bit more but I ended up taking one month and that was an informed choice that I made but it's definitely had ups and downs and some consequences and we'll talk about kind of like what are the realities facing particularly those of us who step out and try to do a startup and how that can go when you're trying to balance parenting and motherhood and or Parenthood really with all of these other things that you might want to do in your life possibly thank you and Jenny my maternity story is a little boring because I was at Riot and as a large company so I was entitled to 18 fully paid weeks no no faffing with the state stuff just all done very easily through Riot and um coming from England where the standard is at least six months and usually a year I I shock people by saying I didn't take my full leave and the reason being I was in LA and we got a daycare spot and when you get a daycare spot in La you take it so I went back to work early and my husband took

two months off as well so we had all this player like Trello board plan of who was going to do what who's going to take what leave or got cut shorts we've got a daycare spot so I ended up taking about I think 15 weeks before I let you do a couple weeks part-time to transition back and then pandemic hit and I ended up kind of using the rest of my leave to do 50 work during the pandemic thank you so while today is mostly about education and awareness about the challenges that mothers can face in the games industry we really hope that people can leave with practical suggestions of improvements or adaptations that you as a parent or you as an ally or you as a company could apply to supporting the the mothers around you so for the first question that I really wanted to the panel to go through I'm wondering what did you feel like was the biggest challenge that you have or are facing as a mother working in games and we'll go to Latoya first yeah um you know the games industry doesn't have a lot of acknowledgment of uh just a kind of a level of workload that they're asking people do we talk a lot about crunch we

talk a lot about all these different uh pieces of it but when I came from film I came from television there's a lot more of a conversation around kind of things like core hours where you're not penalizing parents for not being making early morning meeting or a late evening meeting because it's conflicting with daycare like those kinds of conversations haven't seemed to quite happen yet in the games industry in the way they have in TV and film Charlotte uh for me one of the bigger challenge was definitely the lack of sleep um generally like I would say before six months it is rarer than babies can sleep a whole night but because I was in the US I was not able to take six months maternity leave and so uh basically when I came back to work uh my my babies were still waking up uh like two to three even sometimes four times per night and you still have to work eight hours per day um so what I did for my second maternity leave and it was easier because working

from home was at after lunch for example I would take a small nap which was very helpful and I wish more companies would acknowledge that that when you come back to work so early you you're you don't have the same energies after your baby is one year old for example uh and so and it it's totally fine because it's temporary it's not gonna last your whole career right so I would I would love companies to learn to acknowledge that and to let their uh like mothers young mothers coming back to work being fine with okay you can take a nap after lunch and it's totally fine and maybe maybe the very first month you're not gonna work exactly eight hours and it's totally fine as someone whose children did not sleep through the night until they were five years old I resonate with the lack of sleep comment we think maybe the six-year-old is gonna start sleeping through the night soon big big Hope on

that one how about you Georgina I one of the challenges was child care so I think for everybody every new parent you know what do you do with your young child regardless if they're four months or a year or two years um how do you do that um in a lot of cities it's expensive in Vancouver it's very expensive our solution we're actually very fortunate to have family help out so we pieced it together my husband uh took Sundays and Mondays off so I worked Monday to Friday so he had Monday my Mom helped with three days of the week and his parents helped with a day of the week so it sounds kind of like ideal like wow it's amazing but it's also challenging because they're not um like if you have a child care center it can actually be stable right there's this or this person or this organization that's responsible child care or you know grandparents can be flaky right like my mom took five weeks of holiday and so like she went on vacation what do you do with your young child for five weeks how do you find temporary part-time Child Care

um in that situation um the grandparents also lived half an hour outside of the city and we lived right by our workplaces so my husband would drive my daughter out to the grandparents um in the morning and then after work I would walk home which was 10 minutes away and I'd drive out half an hour and have dinner with my mom and bathe her and put her in her pajamas and then drive home and carefully transfer her from the car seat into the crib and hope she doesn't wake up and you do that for as long as it tastes kind of crazy because you're like just on this crazy cycle of working all day running at the door you got all the time booked afterwards figured out you collapsed exhausted and then you do it again the next day so I think that's my child care story which was yeah it was was uh turbulent I think so many of those challenges in the moment you're just doing it it's just one foot after the other and then in reflection five years later you're like that was

insane yeah how did I do that yeah yeah how about you Jenny we we had the opposite problem in terms of we were as many of us do we moved to work at a studio and we had no support system at all when we had to grow one organically by paying people money mostly um but the thing I really want to talk about that I found challenging is the whole people don't talk about this enough I don't think is actually getting to the point where you have a baby is work being pregnant is work I couldn't take medication that I needed to like helps me actually function um I had doctor's appointments all the time I was high risk and and then I've had two miscarriages which is not something I tell my boss about because you don't necessarily want to be like hey boss I'm gonna procreate and bugger off for six months um so like balancing these crazy unfair equations in your head of like do I tell work that I'm struggling with this thing or will they see me differently will it hurt my promotion prospects and you know I just turned 40. it took me a while to get around to the whole children thing so I'm very attached to my career and I'd like to keep it thank you so I think

you know looking at things like the the overhead and emotional strain of trying to get a pregnant having miscarriages IVF and then when you do finally get pregnant you're like is is everything okay and just that constant anxiety and an extra load you're carrying around that you know your partner's doing their best but they're not living it every day the same way you are so if any folks in the room resonate with this like I've been there happy to talk to you it's it can be easier than my journey it can be harder than my journey but it's not always Hollywood I will say that and I I found that just I walked into that whole process not really knowing anybody who'd been in my shoes and not having anyone to talk to and having to build like online support networks through Reddit mostly to help me get through it all um and now I try and talk about it more so people realize yeah I'm not the only person doing this having this problem having these experiences but it was very isolating at the time remember being the only person at the company who was pregnant or had the only

woman going through that and having to leave meetings to go throw up in the bathroom and then coming back and trying to be ready to go and on it and like not skip a beat but also just being exhausted and your ankles hurt and pregnancy was exhausting and you didn't want to bring it up around folks it was really really challenging I super resonate with that um Matlab options can really vary though depending on what city or what state you're in and what your company offers or doesn't offer to top up or support you in that way and so I think that you're also balancing those decisions with where you happen to be in a Project's life cycle and what type of work you do and when when might be the most optimal time to disappear for mat leave or not and I I can't be the only person who has like tried to calculate back from a ship date okay well I need to be back two months in advance and so nine months before that but then put in some weeks for buffer in case baby comes early or late and when when should I aim to get back at the right moment and then

a project slips its ship date and all your math goes out the window anyways um so one of the things that is challenging is that as we've heard it's not necessarily common for women to be going on maternity leave or going through these moments in their companies and so one of the things that we're hoping is what can come companies do and what can non-parent allies do to help normalize the idea of maternity leave to make those transitions feel smoother or more organic as a part of the company instead of these weird carefully planned and highly controversial moments Georgina to you um I think you may have heard like reports of countries that have more paternity leave so I want to talk about paternity leave when I think about the Scandinavian countries I think it's quite accepted that men take longer paternity leaves and there's a lot of benefits for for women in the workforce for by men

taking paternity leave as well as for the families and for the community at large in Canada we do support paternity leave like there's government support before it but typically in my experience men who do men in the gamedev industry who have taken Pat leave take about a month of time off to be with their child so I wanted to share this story with you um of the technical director at Relic he's the technical director on the Age of Empires 4 game so um we shipped that game last year I don't know if any of you know it uh it's a real-time strategy game massive game uh shipped really well um the team did a fantastic job with it so two years before the ship date the technical director's wife was pregnant and they decided that he was going to take six months of paternity leave so she was gonna take the first six months off to be with the baby and then he was

going to take the latter sixth month and be the full-time Child Care while he uh she went back to work so they they went and did that and in hindsight now um it's uh there were successes from his story so for himself um he was actually surprised that he needed a mental break after working on this game which was five years in development very intense back-to-back development um and for him to take six months off actually gave him time to just have something different to think about so that was a real personal Wellness benefit for him um and he also got to spend a significant amount of time with his baby there's nothing quite like being the primary caregiver of a tiny little person that changes you and so that was something very special for him to do um for his wife obviously she got to go back to work um uh six months earlier um and continue her career so for his family it was great

um for the Age of Empires team um what they needed to do was create a transition plan so they knew he was going to be taking six months off um it was stressful for the team but they looked at who would take on the responsibilities he has a big job that work was spread around and in acting TD was selected to cover for him while he was on his paternity leave so that acting TD got an opportunity to step up to shine he had a huge impact on the game and it furthered his career he got a promotion out of it so it opened up an opportunity for a new role um and then for Relic now we have a senior leader that's come back to work with A New Perspective um with um and a deep understanding of what it's like to be a parent a new parent um and he brings that to his team in the organization he sets an example for future dads who want to take a longer paternity leave of what it can look like what good looks like for for taking a leave and then he also normalizes

maternity leave because now women you know here's here's a man as well but now women taking a longer leave to look after their child and then returning to work is is more normative within the company so it's um I think a really great story that he was happy for me to share with all of you yeah it's really interesting Canada that we have the opportunity for men to take covered paternity leave but it is really uncommon that it happens and the more often that we can get the idea of leave as a part of our ecosystem the less challenge engine is for someone to put up their hand and say like hey it's my turn and I need to go through that we have a system we understand how to build a transition plan we understand how to bring people into a project and transition them out later we understand how the benefits work and every time a company is able to practice those skills it gets easier for the next person who's going through that experience being the first is always the hardest to go through a system in your company's building it with you and I think it's

really important you mentioned that he has brings that New Perspective back to the team you know we talk a lot in the games industry I think about people bringing their whole self to work and being able to be be themselves in their spaces but we tend to think of that more as like it's okay for you to have different hobbies and having multi-colored hair is positive right but we don't necessarily think of it as like talking about your kids at work is part of bringing your whole self to the office and we've uh throughout my career one of the things that I've tried to normalize is discussing my children actively in regards to my work day and in regards to the work I do and encouraging other people to talk about their kids as well so that the idea that we are parents in addition to game developers is just part of our regular discourse instead of this weird thing that we kind of try to pretend isn't distracting us or isn't taking up any time and you know I I'm on top of it I can do everything 100 it's like kids are

a drained on our emotional energy our mental energy our sleep patterns and the more that we can make that a part of the conversation I think that we can normalize the idea of multifaceted humans in the workplace um but I think that regardless of how much time somebody ends up taking off most of us end up having to do that transition back from I'm at home full time as a primary caregiver thinking about not thinking about game development getting a new perspective to I'm working eight hours a day and I'm balancing Child Care needs and I'm trying to figure out what to do on sick days and pro d days and the summer break and the spring break and the Christmas break and that transitional period can be really challenging and I'm wondering Charlene what did you do or do you wish that you had done to better prep yourself for that change I think I think I I think I was able to to get a good preparation about that like for my first maternity leave what I made is

that I actively discussed once it was when I once I said to my lead that okay I'm pregnant and so uh in a few months I'm gonna give birth and my maternity leave is Gonna Last that amount of time um right after that we started to discuss about um getting a more flexible schedule and so basically when I was on Hearthstone at blizzard we were lucky to have very good uh management and Leadership and so when I came back to work um in um in in 2018 uh I I was working from 7am to 4 00 p.m so basically I was the only one with our art director at 7am because he was an early bird too while most of the team most of the Hurston team was arriving at work around 10 10 AM something like that and so I had I had also um attempt a bunch of milk uh when I was

uh when I was still at home during the maternity leave because for me breastfeeding was very important and in addition to that there was a camping room at blizzard in each building I think so when I came back to work I was sure that I would have some milk in advance so if I was too stressed you know to pump that work I still would have one week you know of milk already ready and a big thanks to that pumping Rune then I was able to breastfeed my older one until two years old so that was very helpful like that's an advice I would give to Future mothers or wannabe mothers uh try to discuss about that with your management and your leadership because preparing that in advance having time and like the flexible schedule is definitely going to be very helpful for you I was so happy like I was uh I I was

just half hour working from work and so being able to see our kids at 4 30 and not just for the Bedtime was so amazing that eight to four shift for a long time for the same reason you mentioned this idea of flexible schedules and I think that it you know it's a statement that is very very clear now that covet has had a huge effect on working configurations and how we think about work in the division of where we spend our time that is different than several years ago when we were maybe going through that with our children the first time um at a holistic like project level I would say that making games with everyone fully remotely is still a lot more difficult than making them in person you know most games have ended up shipping slip dates over the last two years it's been really challenging on a lot of friends for a lot of people on Project levels but at individual levels there are a lot of individuals who have thrived working from home more than they

did working in an office space and I think for for a lot of parents it's it's been more of a a mixed bag of blessings and curses over the last two and a half years for myself working at home with kids was very challenging because regardless of whether another parent was already in the space they expected me to be the primary parent and spending eight hours a day on Zoom meant that was either I was not paying attention to my meetings or I was not paying attention to my kids but everybody was feeling disappointed with the amount of focus that they were getting and it wasn't like I could just push that time into the evenings or the weekends because it was all time that had to be overlapping with other humans so for me being able to return to the office was a huge mental health Improvement and my kids were a lot happier because the primary parent was focused on them they had caregiving that was not distracted by slack or Zoom or so on but it's really varied for people that experience has been like and so I put to the whole

panel like what have those pros and cons been for you in working at home through covid Jenny I relocated countries during covet so it's been it was definitely an interesting experience I think you know coming back from maternity leave right before dependent about six months before I guess um and then I went to ship a game during covert from home or whatever I'm still figuring everything out with all the daycare shut was was stressful um but I think I've got to a really good steady state now and I it's a double-edged sword flexibility we're all going to say there were flexibility a lot in this panel um but for me being able to deal with some of these curveballs that life throws you're like Hey My My Daughter's nursery school right now is understaffed the teachers can't come in because they're sick they're asking us to keep our kids home okay I I don't have anywhere else to put the kids so well the kid so what do I do well actually my husband and I can look at our schedules we can say okay I'll take this meeting

you take that meeting and we can be really flexible and we have very understanding teams they're like okay you know as long as you get your work done we're not going to police you also have a lot of good paid time off and sick leave in the UK too so I think you know being able to say okay I'm gonna I have to focus on one thing I don't do the thing when my daughter's working next to me that doesn't work for me my office is in a separate space from my house so I don't walk to the bathroom and see the laundry and go oh gosh I've got to do that I've got to clean the kitchen and all these things that just pile up every day from being at home but having got to the steady state where you know I can deal with those emergencies I I don't have to commute I don't have to make a choice it should my my daughter's school be near my workplace or near my home and like what do we do if you're in the wrong place on the wrong day and just all that overhead is gone and I really appreciate just having that real flexibility to design my life with my daughter the way I want um and I definitely think we've learned a lot of middle of improvements during the pandemic but it was very different when you had a 18 month old baby and a job and nowhere to put the baby so those days are gone for now thank goodness

how about you Latoya yeah I mean um so they're upsizing downside so working at home during covid one of the great things that was about it was that at some point you got to really understand what your kids are doing during the day and who they are and how they interact especially when everybody was on Zoom at one point uh Gavin and I were co-workers and it was just much easier to give him like a little desk in my office and he decorated with Pokemon and had all the stuff together for us to be like just kind of next to each other working and you know over time we kind of worked out the Rhythm so I think that was the best ERA of what was happening but there's also the flip side to it which is like you know you're normally like managing all these different things and different expectations and trading some time for another so like I think at one point um anango who is one of the principals at the studio as well um anango had looked at my calendar when matu and I were going through Tech Stars because we did it remote and Gavin was a full-time school from home because again we're still early in the pandemic and everybody's like well just a few more weeks like it's not gonna be that bad two weeks to flatten the curve two weeks of flat in the curve and then I was like oh just six more weeks okay no so we were still in that like semi-optimistic

error that this is going to end at some point and at one point anongo looked at my calendar and she was like that's not humanly possible like she was like it's just all conflicts it's just all just different blocks of people's conflicts and I was like yeah that's how my life feels right now so it was uh yeah it's definitely a challenge because there isn't that division um and you know that Jen was talking about earlier there's not that division between like okay here's when I am working and here is when I'm at home everything is kind of crashing together all the time and you're just trying to carve out a buffer for deep work I feel like as a writer I haven't had headspace in two years to be able to like deeply sit down and do anything without something pulling at my attention but on the flip side I also don't have a commute anymore we're not at risk in the same way of like going out into the world every single day um so you know there's plus sides and downsides uh I know when my son went back to school after covid I found in some ways I kind of missed it because at least I knew like where he was and that he was safe and then like the post-covered world is very very different than I think the environment

that we started in and so really negotiating that has been almost more stressful than keeping them at home with me even though they were definitely rough days definitely trade-offs I like that you mentioned the idea of competing conflicts all the time because I feel like as a parent there is no concept of free time left there's just choosing which thing you aren't going to do in what order and trying to decide what goes to the bottom of your Moscow list and what goes to the top and just just balancing all of the needs and conflicts there have been quite a few times my husband has found me passed out in front of the laptop open on the bed somewhere where I was like I can just do this one more [Laughter] Charlene how about for you uh for me I I would say definitely has been more challenging uh than having kids uh outside like I love working from home but it's way easier uh to have them in daycare uh especially in the afternoon

like you you need a time to focus on and so when you have two young kids screaming behind you during some meetings uh that's definitely challenging but some things that I really enjoyed even though 2020 was a apocalyptic year for me was that uh it definitely made a breastfeeding easier because being in the same room than my younger one was definitely easier but yeah I hope this won't happen too often hopefully I hope this is a nice chair like that so say we are Georgina mine's a little bit different because my kids are older so at 9 and 12 they're obviously much more self-sufficient so the first year you know we're all transitioning and it's coveted and they're they stayed at home for five months homeschooling and challenging um but I would say overall there's just been a net benefit you know I live um over an hour's commute hour and 15

minute commute from the office and so that means working from home I get 12 hours back in a week which is incredible amount of time it means I'm having dinner with my family every night and I've always worked outside of the home so this has been a very different experience for me and it's with my children the age they are um it's it's been fantastic to be you know together a lot more and yeah and so at this age I would say they're a lot more Pros than than cons I like that you mentioned the community I think the your relationship to your commute as a parent really changes depending on how long it is for you an hour commute is a huge amount of time lost from seeing your family getting out of dinner with them I'm really fortunate to have a 15-minute commute and I love my commute it's the greatest 30 minutes of my day it's silent there's no one I just get to sit alone in a bubble and sometimes I have a cup of coffee no one can talk to me I can't get a slack notification there's no it's just this absolute piece for 15

minutes and I never appreciated that pre-pandemic commutes were like I'm rushing to drop off at daycare and then school and then this and then that and it wasn't until I had worked from home and returned to commuting that I began to appreciate those 15 minutes a day for what they were um and we mentioned a little bit earlier it's this idea of like juggling multiple priorities and I'm sure lots of folks have heard this joke that comes across a joke uh that you know if you want something done give it to a mother um there's this idea that we have this we have a superhuman ability to juggle priorities that other people don't and mothers will figure it out if you give it to them to solve and I think for there's some truth in that and maybe some not so I'm curious Jenny do you feel like becoming a parent has made you better at your job in any ways I think so I think there's there's a lot of things that change when you become a parent and for me one of them was just setting a lot stronger boundaries around my work and saying I am going I have to

get off work and go pick up my kid I have like I for me one of my strong boundaries is I I do family dinner I do bedtime and if someone schedules a meeting during that time I'm like nope and it's taken some training to make sure that doesn't happen especially because I work a lot with the US and they're awake and and working but um getting to the point where you're like no I've got that boundary I prioritize ruthlessly and I think this goes for all parents like we've all had to learn this new job very quickly and it changes every day and just when you think you figured it out your kid grows up a little bit older and learns a new skill and you're like oh how do I deal with this um and just that whole confidence like I can figure things out and I've got it um but I will say I'm in the lead role in engineering and so my my job is pastoral I look after people I grow their careers I solve lots of crazy crisis problems every day and I have a lot of flexibility in doing all of meetings back in previously in my career and I was writing code all day I would struggle with the current boundaries I have because I can just see myself

getting to 4 45 pm and I'm deep in the middle of some crazy bug and I'm looking at the clock and I've got to go pick up my kids and and I know I haven't personally had to deal with that because I chose to have kids when I was a little more further in my career but I can see that that would have been very difficult for me at that point in my career and so figuring out how do you make that trade-off and how do you set those boundaries and keep them as is hard but I have this advantage that as as a leader I can set them I can talk about them I can openly stick to them and hopefully will help those folks who are a little further a little earlier in their careers also keep the same boundaries so hopefully modeling it helps when you mentioned dealing with crises I think of both the best and worst parenting advice that I have ever received was somebody telling me that it won't get better but it will get different and at the time I was deeply depressed when they told me that and over time I've actually become to take that as an extremely positive mantra that like in this moment

it may feel awful and endless and it will change it might be a different awful and endless but it will change and it will be a new problem to deal with and I can just keep putting one foot in front of the other and we will eventually come through that again Georgina tells us that it gets better we hear we're very excited for this um and I think that you know we've talked about a couple different specific companies that have had good policies or bad policies but like even if you happen to find a company that really treats maternity and paternity leave as a regular part of that employee life cycle and you're fortunate enough to get to work in that space the games industry as a whole tends to have a lot of turnover and a lot of movement and a lot of going from one studio and one project to the next to the next to the next and so you might not get to stay with that group of people for the long term and I think that we don't necessarily think about the Domino Downstream effects that that can have on mothers to need to be able to move between product projects and

Studios on a regular basis as chairline I was hoping you might talk to some of those challenges that you saw for you in that cycle of having kids oh yeah definitely if you ask me I would have had kids sooner like I feel like you don't have the same energy uh the same Health at 35s and at 25 and when I was 25 I was ready to have kids I wish I had some at that time but I was I was so scared about the stigma you know uh to to have the plan to have kids in my company because especially at the very beginning of your career like on an average you you're gonna stay two three years and so after one year of experience in the company you're like ah but if I have to tell to my to my boss that I'm pregnant uh sure they probably won't fire me because they are things there are those about that but they're still going to be stigma and and like

it's going to have an impact on my career and stuff like that and I really wish we were able to have kids when we feel ready rather than when we feel our companies ready they the point of view of your employer shouldn't have an impact on your desire to have kids or not I wish companies where were more able to help Mother and future parents actually even even for men in that way and also some things that I feel like is not totally fair and might be part of the reason why women are still less paid than men and is that a lot of benefits are based on the time you spend at work like um profit sharings and career revolutions that kind of stuff the reason why you have blessed you have uh like for higher management you have less

women I don't think it's I want to believe it's not because a company's uh are thinking oh she's a woman so she's not gonna have uh she she she's not going to be a lead or a director or stuff like that I don't think it is because of that I think it's more because when you take a maternity leave then all these benefits are slow down unfortunately and I wish we would rethink we would rethink that way like we would rethink things about that like um career Improvement benefits all this stuff maybe it is outdated to things that it should be linked about the time you spend at work yeah that caregiving that Latoya referred to you know it applies not just to maybe how your salary grows how your vacation accrues how bonuses or profit sharing pay out but it also affects um the type of work that you got to do

on a project if you weren't there during ship you might not get credited on the project depending on your company's credit policies you might not also just get the experience of having gone through a ship that you can then take to your next project so you may be seen as not as capable because you've missed certain parts of a project and that can affect your career growth opportunities promotion opportunities and the there's this Downstream fall on from choosing to take time off to have kids and I think that that's one of the things that is hardest to solve because it is the most invisible pieces of the problem um and so Latoya one of the reasons that I was so excited to have you come on this panel is that you are a Founder at a company which is a unique space to take in the world and from your intro we heard that you've talked about taking that a very short leave with your second that resonates a ton with me I did the exact same thing with my second child we

were a startup it was limited dollars in the bank account limited amount of time available to us so I made the same choice you did it resonates a ton with me but you and I have both discussed that's not we're really conscious that that's not the example that we want to set for the teammates who work with us and the women who come after us and I wonder how you think about balancing that need to bulldoze a path ahead for people while teaching them and setting healthy precedence for them to walk the path that didn't necessarily use the same patterns that we did yeah absolutely I mean one of the hardest parts so you know matunai co-founded the first all women of color game studio and that's a huge accomplishment there's a lot that comes with that including not getting the level funding that say white Founders who are in similar quite frankly sometimes worse positions with less you know chops than we had not being able to have that type of financial buffer that allows you to give generous leave generous packages generous comp and in the interest of also just you know being transparent about the things that happen at the

beginning of the founding of the company I also had a miscarriage and on the way to a funders meeting and it was so bad that mitsu actually came to the hospital with me uh bringing clothes and stuff like that and we had to dust off and pick up and keep going the next day so we've really sacrificed a lot to make glow up what it is and one of the things that we're always conscious of is that we are pushing ourselves to the limits as Founders because we know like there's no one ahead of us like we have to blaze this Trail and keep this thing that we built going and keep it alive and so when I said I made an informed choice to cut my uh maternity short I knew what was going to happen I knew that maybe my milk supply wouldn't come in in the same way I knew that you know I was going to be cutting time with you know the newborn I knew these things were going to happen I also knew that we had come so far and we were at this crucial point we needed to ship and we just had to figure this out um but you don't want to show that to your younger employees or to folks coming up because you don't want them to think that that's what it's going to take or that it's normal and it's been really difficult particularly because like the values that we want to live and the experiences that we have or that we

want to give people more and then financially you can't always so like one of the big things that we do with the company's mental health days like we can gift you some time and especially when things get very heavy in the world uh sometimes we'll just be like okay we're gonna we're gonna shut down a studio two weeks from now for a day so we can all just kind of recover and that's a thing that we can do that doesn't take huge financial resources but we're also trying to always be cognizant of it like just the fact that you know as Founders me too and I are on 24 7 and just doing stuff like I'm rolling meetings and changing diapers and running down the street like all of this stuff work because we're in the middle of so many things but you know we have a pregnant employee right now and you know we're struggling because again there's not that structural support in the United States for just about anything anything at all but particularly for for parents in the workforce where it's like oh well this employee is a contractor because we couldn't make her W-2 is she even eligible for short-term disability insurance are we going to tell her that

okay we will give you the four months off but it has to be unpaid because we don't know if we have these funds is it how can we help you and there are certain things that you know we just can't even do because of the structure of the system that we're working in so I think it's you know it's a mandate on our side to make sure that we are as much as we need to push and innovate in the game Space and do things we want to do also being there to innovate on the side of these are the things that need to change because we want to show that we can have a healthy environment for people who want to have families and that we have a healthy environment for all of our employees overall but it's a it's a difficult Balancing Act and there's sometimes we do have to kind of explicitly be like okay do as I say and not as I do we're going to send you home we're going to keep working we don't want you to do that because we already paid this price for you I think a lot of parenting is also do what I say not what I do especially when it comes to snacks after bedtime it was seriously um in you know in just just in putting together this panel and finding folks to come talk about about the issue uh it

really highlighted the reason we were talking about the issue it was very challenging for me to find women that I knew who worked in games who didn't work at my company um you know Georgina and Latoya were both introduced to me by somebody else Jenny and I connected through a Discord channel for moms who work in the gaming industry and was completely random we never met until yesterday we just threw Discord decided she was going to fly here to do this and then as mom's organizing to come here in person uh making sure that there was child care and groceries and the kids were going to be fed for and the caregiving was in place was a whole set of travel prep that you know a lot of our co-workers didn't have to do to be able to come here and still checking up on our families when we get home you know every part of preparing for this was a reminder of why this was happening and I think it can often feel very lonely to be that first in the situation going through a process or to be in a

minority on your team and it feels like it's a lot harder to advocate for your needs when you're the only one who has those needs at that given time and so Georgina our last question and then we'll move to a q a after that you know you're a woman programmer you're a person of color you're a mom you have lived this life of being a minority in in so many different ways you're 20 years into your career now I wonder when you look back what you would tell your younger self about about the journey that you've gone on yeah um I started my first job as a programmer was at Electronic Arts Canada there were two female programmers I was one of it out of hundreds of men so um that that I'm often I was often the only woman in a room I'm very used to that so that certainly shaped me in my career and just being used to being okay I'm in the minority I don't have examples that are exactly like me and you know you just pull up your boots and

you keep going and you work hard um you don't often want to call attention to yourself I think early on in my career as a programmer I really was conscious of the fact that I never wanted anyone to think that I was hired as a programmer because I was female and you know everybody wants to hire a female programmer because you want to you want to have some diversity in your group and I never want to be that token I wanted people to recognize I was there because I was just as good and I was just as good and I worked just as hard if and if not more to be there so certainly that carried over you know as as a mom um at radical I wasn't I I probably wasn't the first to take maternity to leave but I was one of the first um there weren't a lot of women that took Matt leave um when I was in the VFX company it was a startup I was the first uh I was the only one who took madly from that company they crafted a mat leave policy for me um and I think when you're in that position you know I I had that feeling of like I didn't want to be entitled I

didn't want to ask for things you know that my colleagues didn't have the other programmers or managers around me they didn't ask for flexible working time they didn't ask for these things and I I didn't feel like that that I should ask for those things because that would have only benefited me um so now 20 years into my career I kind of got some perspective um what I want to say you know companies and games they want to retain every single woman who is listening to this talk today so if you're out there and you're thinking about it your company wants to retain you they may not have policies that seem friendly you may be thinking about leaving but it's in the company's best interest for you to stay and grow your career and so you know if there is something that would make your life easier that would make it possible for you to say that that is a consideration um that you should make and talk to your manager

um sometimes it's difficult your manager may not be receptive may not be someone you can talk to and so my suggestion would be to find an ally in the company whether that's a senior person a person that you feel could relate to you whether it's a person on your team on another team another manager someone in HR whether it's a man or a woman someone who can can be an ally because it's so it's often easier to ask for something for somebody else I have a hard time asking for things special things for myself but no problem going hey so and so you know this is their situation and um I think we should consider this you know set up for them so yeah absolutely and I think that if you have a if you are in a position in a company where you have the ability to radiate these things you know making sure that it's really easy for people to find out what your benefits plans are and what your maternity coverage is and the information about where you can breastfeed is publicly available that women don't have to go search for it they may be early in their pregnancy and not ready to talk about that but they can still find the information on your

internal Confluence or whatever that lets them plan and understand what's going on me don't Don't force people to come to you for that information radiate it outwards make it normal to talk about those things to the whole team because you never know who will eventually need that information and so just having to be publicly available at all times can be really helpful for those who are still learning how to advocate for their own needs I think so we've had about five or ten minutes left I think and if anyone wanted to ask any questions we're happy to answer them and I think we're gonna go to the wrap up area is that after yeah um if you wanted to talk to us more we'll go to the wrap-up area on the third floor um gaze up I'm gonna grab them a little short so um five years ago and I was constantly running back and forth to nurse so I see you me too was actually my academic

advisor at NYU when I had my second baby and I was like waddling into her office to discuss how I was going to handle my uh schedule when I came back from having the baby um anyway uh something that I've noticed um in the conversation about remote work is that before the pandemic I could not get positions anywhere because they wanted me to move to Barcelona to Boulder to wherever it was Seattle California and it kind of broke my heart to see the people who were accepting these roles um were often single young white men who could afford to uproot their lives and they didn't have you know children that they were going to have to haul out of school or anything else and I think that kind of gets lost in the conversation about remote when you have all these Studios complaining that they're having a hard time finding people for mid-level or senior roles but they're only willing to consider people who are local or

people who can move who let's face it are often either single or men who have wives who are willing to work with so I guess my question is after saying all of that moving forward now that we've seen that it's possible to ship titles with hybrid and remote work how can we sort of advocate for more flexibility that will enable women to not only enter the game industry and stay in the game industry after they have kids but to thrive um and yeah yeah I think to your question of like how can we advocate for the ability for folks to work remotely in this in this post-pandemic world since that does often benefit women more um one of one of the ways we do it is by talking about it like this um and by bringing it into our hiring conversations bringing to our job requisitions bringing it to our con our HR folks and and really consistently bringing the topic Up And discussing it's not I don't want to work

remote because I hate pants I want to rate work remotes so that I have the ability for my child to stay in the same school system so that I can pick my kid up from daycare because I live really far from the studio and really going into the reasons why that benefits people the types of people it benefits to your point the groups of people who are maybe looking for that more than others and just continuing to to just advocate for it and shine that light on the problem set I think all right um very cute by the way um so I have four boys uh and right now I'm basically the stay-at-home work-at-home parent my wife has a 50 60 hour a week job that she works um so I cook clean my oldest is homeschooled he's 13. uh and in the games industry it's very

competitive to get into it with everybody who you know is also very talented as well they're uh becomes a problem where if I don't have enough time to compete with somebody who has all the time social life it you know isn't trying to type well you know playing tug of war with something in your teeth with the baby at the same time um what's the only thing that I've been able to come up with to sort of let people know that like I've basically decided to start life on hard mode is just put in my LinkedIn I've been a dad for 13 years I struggle with that what what else can you do to sort of portray that this is something that you also have to contend with to sort of give yourself that uh a boost like perhaps I don't have enough time to have a massive body of work but I work just as hard essentially yeah so just to repeat the question in case folks in here at the age is like how can we as parents make ourselves

appealing to hiring managers and in the interview process when we may not have the same amount of disposable time to spend on building a portfolio of work no all good um I have a slightly privileged latent answer there um in engineering you know if I were to change jobs and try and do coding properly I'd have to spend months preparing algorithm questions and it's the same kind of work as I get portfolio together it's a full-time job to prepare for a software engineering job these days and so for me I would do the acid test of like during the interview process be like hey I'm a mom I don't have time for that do you have a different interview process have you caught on it's 2022 and if they say no and I'm like well you're probably not going to support me very well as a parent if I do come and work for you um now I do think that answers a lot of privilege because I'm a bit more senior and I'm engineering where a lot of people are starting to change that conversation but the more that we can within our companies and have the parents within those companies advocate for changing the hiring process to be inclusive to have alternate paths for

those that might not have a bunch of time and to recognize all the different things that those people can bring to the table I think we can change but it's not an overnight thing so those of us in the room that have that privilege are inside companies and can change the processes let's start doing that and make you things we change it for for mothers we change it for fathers we change it for everybody I just want to add quickly like you know just definitely my husband was a lead parent for three years so I understand like how that can be very tough trying to reintegrate or to go back to the workforce and one of the things that I think works best is that networking and proactively kind of trying to reach out because you're not going to be able to spend the hours in the portfolio that you used to you're not going to be able to spend the hours of building new work and doing all the stuff that you need you want to tell me about it um but one of the things that that you can do is definitely uh figuring out if there are other folks particularly like prominent folks who talk about having their families in the media connecting with them talking to them because they'll normally also know like oh here it might be a path to a company that is more flexible and is looking for somebody with your skills and that's easier than us trying to like just do it in isolation because you can't compete

in the same way anymore and if you try to do that you'll just drive yourself insane yeah well I'm there but best of luck yes first and foremost Latoya I want to snuggle that baby I got to snuggle him last night he's very snuggable um one of the things that we we touched briefly on the toil touch briefly on was a mental health days um and one of the things that we haven't touched on is the fact that mental health changes dramatically for mothers um what I'd like to hear is how how would you guys recommend us especially me I'm brand new to the industry I just changed a 10-year career over to my dream career right just I landed my dream job on a triple a title super excited how do we advocate for ourselves when we have mental health days or we need mental health days because postpartum depression is a real thing even mental health especially for our fathers I want our fathers to feel very hurt because I've seen so many struggle like we struggle as parents how do we advocate for ourselves as parents to say I need I need a break I need I'm having

a really hard day that kind of stuff did you do it I can't so for me I think the the only way to do that is to continue to do it and I know that sounds like an extremely simplistic and naive answer but I do believe that in so much of advocacy work it is the Persistence of conversation and the willingness to say it over and over and build a coalition of people who are saying it and bring the attention to an issue it is challenging for companies to hear one person's challenge sometimes and it is also difficult for them to put the corporate responsibility towards solving a problem for one person whereas it is a lot easier for them to do it towards solving for a group of people and so if it is a topic that comes up regularly if it is a group of people who bring a topic regularly at in the like fiscal responsibility of a business it becomes a lot easier to then put resources towards it and respond to

it and so I think that sometimes in these issues it is just the simple Persistence of continuing to have those conversations to bring them to the light and then for those who are listening today who are part of companies to hear your voice saying that and take it back to their companies and like I keep hearing people mention this maybe it's something that we should look into maybe it's something that we need to look at our benefits package our vacation time our sick policy and the more that we can spread that Voice through I think the more of a chance we have of bringing the situations to the Forefront awesome thank you for this panel yes thanks so thank you everyone for joining us today I really appreciate that you all took your time to come and hear us talk we'll go go upstairs if you wanted to chat any further up in the wrap up area and I'm always happy to connect with folks to talk more about this issue as I'm sure other folks here are outside of GDC as well so please stay in touch and if you're looking to find ways to support mothers in your companies or to be supported yourself I hope that you've

been able to take something away today that um towards that effort thank you [Applause] [Music] thank you