Tetris CEO Maya Rogers Wants More Women In Gaming

Maya Rogers has been the CEO at Tetris since 2014. Her father, Henk Rogers, founded The Tetris Company with Tetris creator Alexey Pajitnov back in 1996 — a partnership so huge that Apple TV+ even made a movie about it. But while Maya absolutely grew up around Tetris because of her father’s company (an actor even plays a younger version of her in the film), she doesn’t believe that her position at Tetris was something necessarily set in stone for her. “I don’t think I was groomed to become who I am today,” she tells Refinery29 Australia during the 2025 Red Bull Tetris Semi Finals in Dubai. “But, you know, different circumstances led to another, and I had an opportunity to come work for him, and that I did.”

Gaming has traditionally been considered a male-dominated industry. The 2024 Australian Game & Development Survey showed that women working in the gaming industry sat as low as 22%, and only 4% identified as transgender, non-binary or gender diverse. On the contrary, the 2025 Australia Plays report, as reported by Screenhub, revealed that 51% of Australian video game players are female. It’s a figure that matches US research closely, showing the disparity between women in the gaming population versus in the workforce.

As a woman in a leadership position herself, Maya ensures she’s influencing and questioning those within her industry when it comes to other female roles within the gaming landscape. “We’re half the population, and we bring in a lot of money into the industry, and so I always question when our licensing partners are developing a new Tetris game: how many women do you have on the team? Because our demographic is close to 50[%].”