The Founder of Girl Geek Academy on What Girl Gamers Can Do If They Feel Like They Don’t Fit In

Lisy Kane is a girl geek and proud.

And Kane, along with fellow girl geeks Sarah Moran, Tammy Butow, Amanda Watts and April Staines, is determined to nurture and support all other women like them with their Girl Geek Academy.

Founded in 2014, Girl Geek Academy offers game jams and hackathons targeting women, Girl Geeks ‘A.I. High’, in partnership with Microsoft, and STEM-based school holiday courses for girls and their mums, all with the aim of teaching one million women tech skills by 2025. 

“The end goal for us is seeing women embrace, and be embraced, by technology so they go on to build their own tech businesses or sit in high-level positions at companies,” says Kane. She says they teach anything from playing and making games to drones and everything in between. 

“We really continue to ask the question of what would the Internet look like if more women were building it? That’s how we were founded.”

Kane herself has been playing games since she was aged five, but hadn’t realised she could have a career in it until she dropped out of uni for the second time and was reassessing her career path. Once she discovered she could study a degree in game design, she says her world flipped upside down. It had taken her ‘til her early 20s to even realise there was a games industry, let alone people in Australia making games.

“It became this really big a-ha moment for me, and I went fully into software design and learned as much as I could about the whole process of game development,” Kane says.

“And that’s what really sparked that interest for me and helped me build a career out of it. It’s still pretty wild to me that I get to do what I do, but it’s very, very exciting and awesome.”

But while Kane is thrilled to now be working in her dream career, it hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing. She says that there is a toxic culture within the global industry and gaming community itself, though, in Australia, misogyny and racism do get quickly called out.

“I have had a lot of bad experiences of verbal abuse just for being a woman gamer, and this sucks, especially when you love a game,” Kane says. “There are many advocates within the industry, but still, being one of the only women in a room can be very intimidating.”

To combat this and to find a place as a woman in the gaming world, Kane says she’s tapped into the power of Twitter, getting a lot of her inspiration from the platform.

“Diverse content creators and game developers share knowledge and their own struggles every day on this platform and it’s really been a big part of growing my own understanding of the industry,” she says.

To any gamer girl who also ever feels like they don’t fit in, in addition to jumping on Twitter, Kane advises them to surround themselves with supportive people and to find their advocates and allies.

“Be fearless,” she says. “Get out there. There are probably others feeling the same way you are. Talk to people who inspire you. When you think you are done dreaming, dream bigger. Create, play and trust that you are on the right path.”