Maybe they're not calling the shots on content in quite the same way as TV executive, but they're definitely the ones getting rich off of it, anyway.

From run-of-the-mill influencers to professional makeup artists and drag queens.

I found that unexpected and very fascinating.

That said, it doesn't mean that those new creators couldn't still be "successful" in such a situation. Just that someone else with more money is still making more money than them.

For context about this, the overwhelming majority of female-targeted Japanese fiction is written by females and with that I mean that I do not know of but a single example of a male auctor having published anything in the female demographic.

The reverse is not true; — there are a great many highly successful male-targeted works produced by female auctors, by which I mean some of the most seminal and influential works in both action and romance.

I'm not usually a gender essentialist, but there's a certain style of some Japanese media of which I often feel that without knowing for sure I can say with 95% certainty that the auctor is female, but I can never be certain of that the auctor is male.

I'm also not sure as to why it would be cynical. If anything, I would feel that it would be good for marketing if it were known that a male wrote it, because it's as said a novelty and many would want to see it because of that. Perhaps you believe that, as the article suggests, this is actually some kind of new development? Be not misled by spectacular news reporting, as otome games and fiction are a very old and commercially viable market rather than some new innovation. — it is certainly not some new development that someone realized this and there are thousands of such games, novels, strips, television series, audio dramata, and whatever other medium, nigh all of them written by female auctors.

I assume you don't mean Ikuhara, so I'll say that many of the things people like about Sailor Moon worldwide were invented by Ikuhara (a man) rather than the manga author, who was more into adding the things Japanese romances have that tend to offend worldwide audiences like romances with way older men.

Although there's certainly other men who try writing anime for women with LGBT content, I don't know if any of the others are actually very good at it, maybe some KyoAni directors.

What tends to happen is that women start products/media that appeal to women, then as it grows, men take notice. They get brought on in management and finance roles, because they have established connections in those fields (where connections are crucial). And too often, that means importing the cultures that drove women out in the first place, in both old and new media.

I hope we get more stories like this, where the women can maintain control. The article points out that they never took VC money. But it's also because they started out moderately wealthy; they were effectively their own VCs.

Female-specific VCs are going to take enormous amounts of flak if they try, but it may be a route to reach whole new markets. Rather than just turning things pink and or making more dating sims.

the people in the article identified a market and took a risk to tackle it and have success in it, others did not. their experience in understanding the market is likely because of their background. other organizations could benefit from the same thing with inclusion that ignored pedigree, which literally means elevating people to decision making roles that have unfamiliar backgrounds and unfamiliar experience (this is in addition to underrepresented people that do have familiar backgrounds and experience), yes, the worst nightmare for some of you all. corporations are about addressing a market, not placating its employees.

The “old guard” in business don’t take risks. They let others de-risk ideas for them (by executing on them successfully until they find repeatable patterns for success that don’t require a “spark” of creativity), and then come in as a fast-follower with far larger pocketbooks to do the same thing, but better and more polished and at higher scale.

Who wrote most early romance novels? Women. (After, that is, the medieval-era proto-examples that were written by men because only men were taught to read and write.) But, once pulp romance novels became a commodity, who was it that started founding companies like Harlequin to take advantage of the known market? Men. And now those companies, by sales volume or revenue, produce most of the romance-novel content in the world. They might employ many women writers at the bottom level (though sometimes those are men under pen names!) but most of the money is going to the men working for the publisher, the distribution chain, the bookstore corporations, etc.

I don’t see anything stopping this pattern from repeating with otome games. If it hasn’t happened yet, that could just mean that the business model hasn’t yet been sufficiently de-risked for the old guard’s tastes.

Look at any social media company. Employees most men, users mostly women (anyone who buys ads can check this for themselves). The only gender balanced social network is LinkedIn.