According to a new survey, men working in the game industry earned $85,074 on average in 2013 and women made an average of $72,882, excluding students and educators.
This translates to women making 86 cents on the dollar compared with men. So the gender wage gap exists in the game industry, just as other industries. But, this is significantly better compared with the U.S. average of women earning 77 cents per dollar of men's salaries, according to a 2012 Census Bureau survey.
The Game Developer Salary Survey 2014 from game industry website Gamasutra also broke down the wage gap by specific jobs in the video game industry. Game designers had the smallest gap, with women earning 94 cents on the dollar. Visual artists had the largest gap, with women making 74 cents on the dollar compared with men.
Interestingly enough, according to the survey, in the role of Quality Assurance, women earned more: $1.04 to a man's single dollar. The survey's responses indicate that women were only 12% of the QA testing workforce, though.
This gap in the composition of the game industry is quite prevalent. For programming and engineering in the industry, men made up 95 percent of the workforce, leaving women to a mere 5 percent. The least unbalanced section of gaming were producers, where women made up 22 percent of the workforce, compared with 78 percent for men.
According to Kris Graft, editor in chief of Gamasutra, more flexibility in work hours and conditions could help close the gender wage gap. He points to a theory from Pew Research that women are more likely to have a career interruption than men, since more women take time off to care for family. Those career interruptions may be affecting long-term earnings for women.
"The gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced and might vanish altogether if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours," Harvard labor professor Claudia Goldin stated in a paper.
In April, President Barack Obama signed two executive orders to help fight the gender wage gap. The first order prohibits federal contractors from retaliating against workers who discuss salaries with each other. The second order is for new rules for contractors to file data with the federal government that reveals how they compensate workers, including by race and sex.
The Game Developer Salary Survey 2014 from Gamasutra was conducted in May 2014, and it gathered data for the 2013 calendar year. The survey gathered over 4,000 unique responses worldwide, partnering with market research company Audience Insights.
