Roblox and WiSTEM: A Corporate Failing

So, the topic: Women and Roblox.

Specifically, we're going to be talking about developers today, and how gender possibly seems to divide this obscenely large, yet mysteriously enigmatic workforce that drives a multi-billion dollar company with hundreds of millions of users.

Without doing any research myself, I will state a hypothesis: Most front page developers are male. Most UGC creators are a mixed bag of female and male. This is not women's fault. More women and girls should be creating and working with front page games, and they should be inspired by other women who are working on them.

I am also going to go out on a limb and state that things like the gender pay gap likely exist and are much more severe in this unregulated, wild-west of a labor market. It is almost impossible to figure out how much any given Roblox developer rakes in annually, and it is almost impossible to track down who even is a developer at all.

99% of Roblox experiences are managed by individuals operating under site division "Groups", with no legal representation pointing to some kind of business entity or otherwise. Additionally, of those who are affiliated with some kind of company, they are often secretive and do not have much, if any, public presence. There are only a couple, maybe less than 2-3 that I could think of, instances where any company on this platform has some kind of physical location, either.

These facts make researching the demographics of the Roblox Developer community very difficult. Additionally, it is an online platform where showing your name or face can often be harmful and straight up dangerous. So, how would one even approach understanding the issue of gender divide within this nameless, faceless blob of what is largely uncompensated child labor?

Roblox themselves doesn't provide any internal registry or information to developers about their fellow creators. However, they do have a rudimentary understanding of the makeup of the population of their workers, as they sometimes dish out surveys and questionnaires that request developers to give up some personal information about themselves.

This means that, even if the accuracy is questionable, Roblox themselves does have some kind of internal representation of what their developer population looks like. Additionally, Roblox captures analytics about the player base of every game, including but not limited to: Age, nationality, language and gender. This information is only privately available to the owners of the experience. But that doesn't leave us any closer to understanding the population of Roblox developers.

If we knew how many women there were compared to men, and if we knew the average take-home pay of top earning Roblox developers, especially cross referenced to gender, we could initiate dialogue surrounding how WiSTEM issues plague Roblox developers. My hypothesis, or intuition, tells me that it is not a great looking situation for women and girls in the Roblox ecosystem.

One area where there is likely an undeniable advantage for women and girls in Roblox is the UGC community. This community is a separate grouping of developers who produce avatar items that are publicly sold and traded on the "Marketplace". Anyone can buy accessories, clothes, packages, and a number of other things for their avatar which were designed by a "UGC Creator". But that still doesn't give us any insight at all into how gender divides us Roblox developers and how it affects our pay grade.

Alas, this leaves us at a standstill, hungering for any kind of statistical reference to analyze. The unfortunate reality is that we are at a place where Roblox as a company is on deck to either leave us in the dark about this data or enlighten the community with anything they so choose to use. What we are able to learn about the developer community's demographics is at the will of the corporation itself. And, unless they have some actual incentive to give out that information, we are in the dark about how Roblox treats and addresses possible underrepresentation of women in its ecosystem.

— Marceline Croyle