The difference between the payment of men and women has always been a subject that has made people feel uneasy. But most hard conversations are worth having, and it still seems as though the topic of women in the video game industry being underrepresented in senior roles still has a lot of room for discussion.
Today GameIndustry.Biz put out an article explaining that 72% of large UK games firms have a bigger gender pay gap than the national average. However, what the article fails to mention is that one of the prominent reasons on why women are being paid less is due to a lack senior roles provided for them. You can see this for yourself by looking at the UK Government’s Gender Pay Gap service here.
This, of course, does not mean the pay gap issue should be waved aside. However, the bigger problem seems to be the fact that the companies mentioned in the report (Bandai Namco, Sumo Digital, Sony, etc) are not employing nearly as many women in senior positions as men. This is causing a discouraging gap in mean and median hourly averages between men and women.
GameIndustry went on to state, “according to our calculations, women make up an average of 39.29% of the top quartile (highest earning employees) across all large UK businesses. No video games firm matches this.” This in itself further proves the point that women are not rising to the higher-paying roles men do in the industry. But why is that when female gamers are on the rise, now more than ever?
There are plenty of theories on why women aren’t rising to more prominent roles in tech and gaming, but there are no clear cut answers as of yet. What is clear is that there is still a lot of catching up to do before women and men can be seen as truly equal in the video game industry, though how long it will be before that happens only time can tell.
We still don’t know the full list of companies with a pay gap issue, though more have promised to reveal their statistics soon. Until then we can sit and wait and come to terms with the fact that women in the industry are needed in managerial and senior roles more than ever.
