The first question in this Ubisoft customer survey is “What is your gender” with “Male” and “Female” as permitted responses; if you choose “Female,” you’re dumped into a screen that informs you that “your profile doesn’t suit the survey.”
Games companies have got a lot of stick over the years for their failure to understand, cater to, and appreciate their masses of female customers, but it’s a rare thing for a company’s commercial blind-spots to be so vividly illustrated in two screens.
According to the linked article and Ubisoft’s Twitter, it was a logic mistake in the survey programming that they have now fixed.
But being a statistician who has written and disbursed surveys, I can say this: this is still sexist af, even if the intention wasn’t to dissuade women from taking the survey. When you create a survey, the first thing you do is test it, and then you have your colleague(s) test it. Naturally, you use your own demographics and responses. This means that this survey was likely not passed to a single woman in its development.
Ubisoft is really showing off its internal hiring process and who they give work to with this blunder. Spoiler: it isn’t women.
–CM Lilith
Not only that, but not one of these men thought to answer “female” to the very first question.
When you’re trying to test something, you have to try all sorts of things in order to break it, just to see where the faults are.
Not one dudebro in Ubisoft thought to answer “female” to the First Question.
