Perhaps inspired by the likes of Ubisoft’s Jade Raymond (pictured), the [URL=http://guildhall.smu.edu/]Guildhall at SMU[/URL] has reported that 20.0 percent of its January 2010 incoming class is female.

Compared to the percentage of women who currently work in game development, which the Guildhall puts at between 4.0 and 6.0 percent, this statistical anomaly has the school very excited, as Founder and Executive Director Peter Raad noted, “There has been a disparity between the number of men versus women in the video game industry far too long and we believe this increase represents a growing trend of more women seeking a career in game development.”

The Guildhall also shared that among the new students (cohort 14 is how the school refers to this latest class) are a pair of twin sisters studying software programming, a veteran of the Iraq War, a former NASA intern and students from Malaysia and Israel.

Raad believes that such diversity could lead, eventually, to better games being developed, “To create games that are compelling and games that appeal to an ever-expanding market of gamers, diversity must be cultivated within the development community, as well as within the individual teams that develop a single game.”

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