I think the main reason why there are few women playing Netrunner is that it draws its players mostly from male-dominated pools:
- Gamers in their 30s
- Gamers interested in a “lifestyle” game
- Hobby boardgamers
- People who have played other CCGs (Most players in my area are ex-L5R or ex-AGOT players)
- People who like Cyberpunk
- Programmers and computer people (Like 80% of players in my area seem to be on this career path.)
Aditionally the community moves through male-dominated spaces:
- Hobby shops
- Internet forums, Reddit
- Slack, private Whatssap groups
I’ll explain the last one. It’s an open secret that the activity and level of discourse of Stimhack dropped after Slack was created and something similar happened when European hubs of discussion moved away from forums (That everyone can read forever) to chats (That are very time-sensitive and generally less accessible).
So if you are someone with a smaller amount of access to the game (New player, less involved in the community) you miss out on a ton of info. This disproportionately affects women as they tend to be less involved and have less access on average than men.
Unfortunately, I think there’s very little the community can do to change things. Most are social issues that cannot be solved by any given group and the rest require amounts of work and effort that the Netrunner community cannot give.
I think it’s a non-starter, sadly. Netrunner is not the right product for this kind of fandom. It’s just not where its strenghts lies.
Also, keep in mind that this is work. Worse, it’s unpaid, often ungrateful work and someone has to do it.