Lost Wage Rampage is a new riot grrl driving game about stealing what you’re owed and destroying everything else.
Lost Wage Rampage
Out today, Lost Wage Rampage is as punk as games get. It’s about two angry shopping centre clerks who plunder their local shopping centre after discovering their male colleagues’ paychecks are larger than theirs. They roll their orange convertible over whatever they want – shirts, computer hardware – and scoop up cash. If cop cars catch up to them three times, the game is over. A round lasts anywhere from 30 seconds to several minutes.
Lost Wage Rampage
“Punk” isn’t just a hand-wavey way to say “mad”. Lost Wage Rampage is free on Itch.io, with the brevity and energy of a punk song and a vintage ’00s Flash game vibe. It’s for the people, easy to pick up. It plays like Katamari Damacy, with obvious controls but laboured steering. It’s unpolished, but artfully unpolished, like a patch-studded jacket. Its killer punk rock soundtrack helps make its case.
Lost Wage Rampage spits its message in your face. But it’s having fun while flipping off the gender pay gap. It’s a gut-punch of girl pwr that goes to show that fighting the system or whatever can bring people together.
Disclosure: I’ve met the game’s developer and designer several times.
Comments
53 responses to “Punk Heist Game Flips Off The Gender Pay Gap”
I think in order to kick off this muthafucka we need to start paying nurses and teachers— both historically seen as primarily female roles— properly. You can work in the back end of the health industry as a high school dropout (as I once did) and get paid more than a nurse after their education. How does that make sense?
And teachers should be paid like doctors (with the education similarly enhanced in order to bring prestige back into the role).
Once we get that sorted, I strongly believe the rest will start falling into place.
I was over seeing the women in my life put up with this shit twenty years ago and it has moved at the pace of an ice age since.
I couldn’t believe I was paid more than my missus when looking at the difference between our jobs, even comparing the benefits.
She is management in the disability field and still spent time with her clientele, her work load and duty of care is insane.
Meanwhile I was packing boxes then just to waste some time and pay the bills.
What nurses do you two know? Every nurse i know gets paid 80k-100k+? I’m currently doing my nursing degree and the pay is amazing!
I don’t know what you’re referring but to as the pay is shite for the hours and responsibility. I worked in health for $120k a year with no education beyond year 11. Both of my parents and a brother are nurses. Pay’s not amazing at all and they’re always tired and grumpy.
Aside from her, everyone she works with and a few friends in the hospital side of things.
80-100 is what you can get, what they don’t tell you is how long that takes, how much experience and skills you need to accumulate and the piss poor conditions and work load you have to endure.
(Not even close to that in the disability field though)
80k is awful for shift work. Go ship products for Murray Goulburn on night roster with no responsibility, bed pans or death and make $120k.
I really have to disagree with the majority of what you’re saying. I’m studying nursing and know plenty of registered nurses from both recent graduates and experiences RN. The money is amazing and well deserved for those jobs. I know people who worked a 5 day roster/3 day break that clear over 100K. Statistically it’s well paid and highly demanded. If you know people who are earning less in the field of work i highly suggest they speak to their unions.
But that really isn’t the wage inequality between sexes.
That’s different fields of business paying their employees based on what they deem is appropriate for that field. Sounds like your wife isn’t getting paid a reasonable wage based on the workload she is doing, unless you’re packing boxes in an upmarket business.
Wage inequality would be if both your wife and yourself were packing boxes for a living, and you got paid more solely due to you being male.
Didn’t say it was, just commenting on Bees statement of seeing differences between speciality trained and untrained.
It didn’t make sense to me that a highly trained individual with such high responsibilities had such a difference in pay compared to a position with almost zero responsibility.
Of course she was underpaid, her position falls in to the nursing category.
You can graduate with a 5yr Arts degree and be unemployable bum.
You can (could?) skip class at grade 10 (or 12, for sake of argument) and at 18yo be earning $150K+ driving Tonka trucks around a mine, with minimal on-job training.
The world is not fair.
I know mate, it was a personal example.
(Closing cardboard boxes isn’t exactly driving a truck either)
Those bloody Tonka trucks are almost completely automated these days anyway but I won’t start in robots and instead quite the Simpsons.
“It will be your job to build and maintain those robots!!”
dude the high risk job, you can kill people, you have to work illegaly fast then the law says,these are unritten rules if you want keep your job in those places, its not as simple as you keep making thing to be.
That’s an extremely narrow perspective on income inequality. In practice, people working in female dominated professions receive, on average, significantly lower incomes than people working in male dominated professions with similar qualification levels.
The income disparity cannot be explained, statistically, by anything other than the gender mix of the respective work forces. It has virtually nothing to do with ‘market forces’.
There are a range of reasons contributing to this, such as the legal principle upheld in Australian courts for decades that male wages needed to support a wife and children while female wages were assumed to support either a single women or supplement the male’s income.
Regardless, despite dramatic changes in female workforce participation rates, and indeed, in skills shortages in a number of traditionally female dominated professions such as disability support and nursing, there has not been anything like the improvement comparative wage rates as you might otherwise expect were ‘market forces’ operating as textbooks suggest they are supposed to.
Going to need some serious citations on that. The income disparity cannot be explained, statistically, by anything other than the gender mix of the respective work forces if that’s all you look at, but that is, as you yourself put it, an extremely narrow perspective.
Take my job for instance, I work in an industry full of freelancers who dictate their own price, someone can charge half of what I charge for the exact same job purely because their confidence and negotiating skills aren’t high enough, they don’t know their actual value, or they have low value customers who don’t appreciate the value of their work. If I am a man, and some of them are women, you could take an extremely reductionist view and say “look! there’s a gender wage gap!” But that is misleading bordering on irresponsible if huge decisions are made around that simplistic assessment.
Are some women underpaid for men for the exact same job? Probably. Should that be happening? No fucking way. But is there a systemic wage gap that can be wholly attributed to what your gender is alone? No.
The only time I have ever seen actual evidence of a wage gap has been between older and younger staff in the exact same role (something damn near impossible to find outside of retail and hospitality), such as checkout staff. That wage gap, a real wage gap, is one that needs changing.
Seriously mate, pretty much every word you have written is based entirely on your own personal impressions and feelings.
Going to need some serious citations on that? Sure, like you, we’re all PHDs in whatever field we happen to have an opinion about in the morning, but for those who do respect something like well researched studies produced by full time professionals there is absolutely no shortage of evidence just a quick google away.
But since you asked, try for example https://www.wgea.gov.au/sites/default/files/Gender_Pay_Gap_Factsheet.pdf
I’m quite sure that you will be able to convince yourself, regardless, that despite all the masses of data produced by government departments and the ABS your highly circular personal opinions are just much so closer to the mark than the well researched conclusions of professionals whose full time careers are dedicated to researching this stuff.
Yep, completely random chance and/or market forces largely explain why there just happens to be a gender pay gap of between 8% and 29% between full-time employees in every single employment category from labourers and clerical employees to senior management.
And climate change isn’t real because I was cold this morning. And the earth is flat.
Look, let’s just dial down the snide tone for one second ok? We’re both on the same side, we both want people to be paid what they are owed. And I apologise in advance for the long comment but I want to give your response and linked citation the consideration it deserves.
Firstly, you’re not going to convince anyone of anything by comparing them to flat-earthers when they ask you for citations for the claims you are making. You can’t throw out the whole snide “google it” thing when you’re the one making the claims, it’s your responsibility to support your claims with evidence, it is not the responsibility of others to fact-check your argument for you.
Regarding your linked citation, it compares all full time women against all full time men in its national pay gap, meaning a full-time retail staff member’s wage is being used in the average against a full-time lawyer’s wage. This is so broad that it’s essentially worthless. It also explains the statistically massive fluctuations (10% – 24%, for example) in the data.
So essentially, it doesn’t compare men and women doing the same job (a huge part of the marketing for any wage gap related campaigns), and more than that, it doesn’t bother to determine or explain the causes of this difference. Note that even they use the word causes, plural, to talk about potential reasons, which flies in the face of your argument: “The income disparity cannot be explained, statistically, by anything other than the gender mix of the respective work forces. It has virtually nothing to do with ‘market forces’.”
They then suggest some of these possible causes:
• women and men working in different industries (industrial segregation) and different jobs (occupational segregation). Historically, female-dominated industries and jobs have attracted lower wages than male dominated industries and jobs.
• a lack of women in senior positions, and a lack of part-time or flexible senior roles. Women are more likely than men to work part-time or flexibly because they still undertake most of society’s unpaid caring work and may find it difficult to access senior roles
• women’s more precarious attachment to the workforce (largely due to their unpaid caring responsibilities)
• differences in education, work experience and seniority
• discrimination, both direct and indirect.
Some of these points, like female dominated industries attracting lower wages than male dominated industries, don’t go into further detail about why this is. It’s not just because women’s work is less appreciated or society is sexist against them, it could have so many more reasons than that. Ask why, even though the industry is dominated by females, the average wage is still so low? Wouldn’t the majority percentage of women working in the field lead to higher wages? Would women be discriminating against themselves when it comes to wages? That makes no sense. Is this a case of simple economics, if female dominated industries make less money overall, is there just a cap on how high the wages can realistically go?
I don’t know the numbers behind these questions above, but they are worthwhile questions to ask. Remembering that rather than just complain about the perceived inequality or demand equality of outcome, we’re trying to find a real cause and solution here, I think we’re all well served in asking more questions and being less quick to rush to the answers. We don’t want to fall into the trap of “correlation = causation”. We don’t want to attack the symptoms of the problem rather than the problem itself, and we want to make sure there actually is a problem, rather than a justified difference in industry earnings.
Again, to be clear, we both want the same thing: for people to be paid what they deserve. But we need to be careful that we aren’t throwing the baby out with the bathwater based on incomplete information.
Look, I genuinely appreciate you inserting a conciliatory note into the conversation, but ultimately Occam’s razor applies here.
When faced with a universal gender wage disparity, quite literally, regardless of employment sector and full time status, and faced with a huge range of detailed research, you nonetheless continue to fall back on edge cases and alleged gaps in the summary information in a transparent attempt to disprove what the data and weight of expert research overwhelmingly demonstrates, as if none of the questions you raise have ever been asked before, or answered.
I don’t pretend to be an expert in the field. I don’t pretend to have done the research myself, and I won’t presume to write a PHD on the subject in the Kotaku forums. I am happy, in fact, to rely on the informed opinions of hundreds of dedicated public servants and academics working full time in the area who have definitively arrived at the conclusions that you appear to be so resistant to.
Under the circumstances, given the sheer amount of effort you are dedicating to arguing counter positions, it appears much less like a genuine attempt to understand the issues and much more like a straight forward exercise in denial.
Or maybe you just enjoy being contrarian.
@angorafish
The effort I’m putting into this isn’t because of denial, it’s because I actually want to discuss this properly. It’s not Us vs. Them, it’s not black and white. I can want the same thing as you while still being skeptical of the conclusions non-experts are drawing from data that has been collected by experts.
You’re right, I do enjoy being contrarian, but it’s not to piss people off, it’s to find the flaws in our biases so that we can ultimately create a stronger argument. Better that an ally points out your mistakes whiles there’s still time to fix them than an enemy (although “allies” and “enemies” is a reductionist way of looking at things).
I think where we’re disagreeing isn’t in the fact that there is a gender wage gap, it’s the reasons behind it. The popular narrative is that the gender wage gap is something inflicted upon women, rather than the result of a myriad of factors including personal decisions. There’s a wage gap, the numbers don’t lie about that. But that’s all they’re telling us right now. We have to get to the real root of why.
@geometrics , there’s no question that the gender wage gap is the result of a multitude of factors, which I acknowledge in the third paragraph of my original post.
Where we appear to disagree is that the data upon which you rest your arguments more or less entirely appears to have been chosen selectively to exclude historical, structural and social bias from the equation.
In fact, we know that for many decades in Australia women’s pay was intentionally and legally set substantially lower than men’s.
We know that female dominated careers such as teaching and nursing and child care were historically done by voluntary labour (eg nuns) and as a result pay rates in those industries started from a historical base-line of zero.
We know that women are less likely to ask for a pay raise than men (boys are encouraged to be active, while girls are encouraged to be passive from a very young age).
We know that women do less overtime on average because they need to leave early to pick up the kids while their husbands work back late at the office.
We know that Barnaby Joyce isn’t resigning because he was subjected to a wave of questioning about how he can manage to juggle both a political career and a new baby, while we know that this question has been put to NZ PM Jacinda Ardern by mainstream media personalities on multiple occasions.
We know why. None of these factors are in dispute. All of them are supported by masses of extremely robust and rigorous academic research undertaken by highly educated professionals over many decades.
Nobody significant argues that employers should simply top up every single women’s pay packet on a balancing scale in some misguided attempt at equality. Nobody significant argues that employers are still arbitrarily drawing a red line through women’s employment contracts to intentionally reduce their wages.
The entire argument for pay equality is about removing as many as possible informal, social and structural barriers to the self-evidently perverse outcome of women getting paid less than men on average across the board.
You can’t exclude historical, structural and social bias from the discussion, historical, structural and social bias is the discussion, because the only other explanation for gender pay inequality is that women are simply not as capable, driven, talented, career focussed and/or as intelligent as men.
ABS data is the headline, it’s not the argument and you are not the first to ask these questions.
The fact that you continue arguing from the assumption that you are the first snowflake to ask the probing, critical questions for which nobody else in the entire discipline has ever found a satisfactory explaination establishes nothing more than your ignorance of the literature.
edit: Aaannd, back into moderation hell. Apologies for the delay in replying.
thatteemo, you are missing the mark. Wage inequality goes beyond “These two people work the same role and get paid rather same!”
I was going to elaborate but, honestly, there’s no point and I can’t understand it for you.
Nurses and teachers, in general are definitely underpaid, especially now with the extra piece of paper you need to become a teacher. The wife is working until 10:30 every weeknight, half of the Christmas holidays and don’t even talk about term holidays…
I think the reason skilled and unskilled jobs pay proportionately more than trained “white collar” jobs is because generally speaking, you aren’t able to work for as many years due to the physical stress placed.
I can’t talk for nurses, but the difference between working as a sub-contractor/manual labourer and working within the school system, physically, is immense.
Also, just slightly dirty at all the things nurses can salary package compared to teachers. Wouldn’t mind salary packaging my mortgage, car, and entertainment… But that’s wayyyyyy off topic lol
While not suggesting the gender gap doesn’t exist in this field or other fields.
I think part of the issue with nursing it is the same reason why criminal lawyers get paid a small amount compared to corporate or tax lawyers.
Criminal law is sexy and people want to make a difference leading to a greater supply of people wanting to get into the field.
Same reason why pilots in the US are around minimum wage and have 2 jobs. Tons of people want to fly vs the need leading to wage pressure.
I know a few nurses and they love their job, helping ppl etc. Lots of people are passionate about the field leading to increased supply vs demand.
Where did you get this rubbish about pilots in the United States needing two jobs?
https://www.indeed.com/salaries/Pilot-Salaries
My teacher friends are actually some of the highest paid people I know. Perhaps it’s because we’re all still in our 20s and that the entry level income for teaching in Australia, especially in private schools, is quite high comparative to entry level incomes in other industries. I guess there’s more of a ceiling there though in terms of progression, if you stay a teacher, I doubt you’d have much wage mobility past a certain point. Just one of many factors that account for wage disparity between different industries.
I definitely agree though, teaching should be treated with the prestige and responsibility that medicine has. It should be paid higher, and have a much higher barrier of entry. Post-grad only if I had it my way.
Yeah, a teachers wage seems impressive in your early 20’s. The limitations are limitless though, and by the time you’re 30 you’d realise you hit the glass ceiling 4 years in.
1. Teachers in QLD are paid some AMAZING starting salaries, with really good progression for at least 6-8 years. Teachers are low-risk, and if you’re switched on enough you can wing your days <48hrs in advance (no I don’t speak shit, I have friends that learn their material the day before).
2. 4 year degree versus 6, OK..
3. Doctors have actual risk component, human death.
4. Are you actually trying to compare a lesson-plan-prepared-for teachers mental load, for the load of a doctor?
I didn’t compare doctors to teachers. I said they should get paid the same. And they should. It’s incontrovertibly true. But let’s get to your numeric points:
1. That’s YOUR definition of Amazing Pay. Not mine and likely not theirs. I wouldn’t do that job for that wage.
2. Yup, an educator could do with a further two years in their degree too. I’ll urge you to look at the reform that took place in Norway. Most people I know who teach probably shouldn’t. Educators deserve the same benefits as the healers you’ve lionised.
3. Yeah, people die. Teachers have the risk of turning a kid away from wanting to learn at a poignant phase of development. People also live.
4. Not that it’s this black and white, but sure. I’ve worked with doctors. I’ve become accustomed to how much of their expertise is simply a perception. We trust doctors. We no longer trust teachers. Both are integral to our futures. One is paid lots. The other is a thankless formative experience.
I mean, I’d support a total overhaul of the education system, in which >50% of teachers are fired, and they are correctly educated and picked on merit not on “oh, you graduated? ok”. In this case, sure, wages would be higher.
Yeah, man! We both want more for the women and kids in our lives. And that means raising the bar.
Yeah 100% fire a huge percentage of current teachers based on the new metric of what a teacher should be. I also want to double down on that comment from superdeadlyninjabees about risk.
Doctors have immediate risk, but the risk of a bad education is something that can have far reaching consequences for generations. Teachers have one of the riskiest jobs there is, they spend more time with the next generation than their own parents do, and are directly responsible for the way they turn out.
When looking at a univariate analysis of such things… A pay gap exists… But only a fool looks at one variable.
Except numerous studies have examined the issue with respect to an extremely wide variety of variables including education level, demographics, labor scarcity, class, immigrant background and other factors. Even allowing for all of these factors, gender alone explains well over 50% of the total income disparity between average male and average female wages.
Wow, you present a reasonable counterargument in a civil manner and got downvoted to hell. It seems that the sexist trolls are in full vigour today.
Sadly, a fool and his opinions are not easily parted.
Aaaaand, looks like I’m been downvoted back into automoderation hell. The men’s rights groupthink is strong with this one.
Could it be, and please correct me if I’m wrong, after explaining how many studies have been done using a multivariate analysis, AngoraFish goes back to using a uni-variate analysis and not even bothering to compare like for like at the very least.
https://www.theaustralian.com.au/opinion/columnists/judith-sloan/it-is-costing-us-6m-to-solve-gender-pay-gap-myth/news-story/6bae6e2d5639f9acd856692ed77bb9d6
Taking an direct excerpt from this article. “In Australia, the average number of hours full-time male employees work is 44.7, whereas the figure for female full-time workers is 41.6 hours. This immediately reduces the gender pay gap to a fraction less than 10 per cent.” That analysis uses 2 variables (gender and hours, 3 if you want to include full-time)
That article is paywall locked and is also from The Australian, which is not a well regarded publication. It’s one step up from its sister paper, the Telegraph, which is a tabloid. It ceased being a legitimate newspaper when it started photoshopping Australian politicians into pictures of nazis.
Then it should be for the GPG myth since it’s a typically leftist idea.
Interestingly I got in it for free? Ihave no subscription either.
It references a very recent Harvard study done though, which I haven’t bothered to look up because a) it already corroborates my thoughts, b) just wanted to use that quote.
But I feel ya bud!
::Edit:: so just clicked the link (currently on my phone, was on PC before) and yes, I can’t access it… Interesting
“My confirmation bias doesn’t agree with your possible confirmation bias.”
Jokes aside, I do agree about the Australian being a questionable citation, though the average hours worked is routinely cited as a good reason for the difference in income.
Apparently pressing edit makes multiple posts now? idk.
Edit is fucked mate. It’s why I didn’t post my thoughts on the game, the themes the game covers are important to some people and I don’t feel I can put together a good comment without needing to edit out possible snark or poorly constructed points.
It’s not my confirmation bias, (although I definitely have bias toward the pay gap being real) it’s not bothering to look at any of the mountains of research on this thing because a Murdoch paper said otherwise. I mean, there’s also research to say that there isn’t a gap. It’s totally there to see.
I never used to have a confirmation bias on this subject. I knew nothing about it. Someone told me it was a thing that existed, so i went and read a bunch of stuff about it. I found the evidence supporting it a lot stronger than the evidence denouncing it and here I am: A card carrying SJW.
See, that’s a counter-argument of your own, a proper way to have a conversation. My comment was directed at the people silently, cowardly opposing with downvotes.
From The ABS just for reference to other comments and well quite simply if 2 people are doing the same job, on the same rate, but one does less hours they are going to make less money.
So male dominated industries have higher average hours and wages, while female dominated industries have the lowest average hours and wages, it does explain a difference in average take home wages between the sexes. In managerial positions there is the highest amount of average hours and it is an area that does have a proven gender pay gap, this high average hourly rate skews the overall average when all fields are taken into consideration.
A lot of early gender pay gap studies were done in the managerial sector and this led to people dismissing the gap in general due to it only focusing on one area, but at the figures show this is an area which would have the most effect on overall averages.
I have seen many reasonings as to why this gap exists, from plain sexism though to these positions often having renumeration negotiated and a gender difference in negotiation skills or other social factors leading to negotiating differently.
In the end you have 2 factors at play, some areas do actually pay less, but these are also the areas that work the longest hours and employ the least amount of workers.
For the majority of workers in Australia are covered by, EBA, CBA or awards which are completely gender neutral.
A lot of the pay gap is easily explained buy industry rates and hours worked, but that is not dismissing the fact that a few areas not covered by awards or alike, the salary type systems have a gap.
http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/featurearticlesbytitle/67AB5016DD143FA6CA2578680014A9D9?OpenDocument
Your cherry picked, highly selective statistics thrown together in 10 minutes for this blog, of course, trump the total output of entire government departments and highly qualified career academics studying the issue full time, for sure.
Clearly the Gender Wage Inequality Industry is just another example of the well known global conspiracy by liberal elites and rent seekers to run their own social justice pity party on the public teat.
They are not highly selective, it is a report on working hours by the ABS.
The whole report was linked for you to read. It took the ABS putting together 30 years worth of data. That’s hardly a 10 minute study.
First off, I have to be suspect of the claim that “female dominated industries have the lowest average hours” when one of the female-dominated careers is nursing.
Second, the study you cite seems to make the argument that the wage ap /does exist/, only that it can be explained, partially, by a series of mitigating factors. Chiefly among them is the apparent fact that men have been found to work longer than women on average, even in the same field, in the same company.
That sounds right and all until you think carefully about it: if it’s true that men are paid non-hourly wages that are higher than women’s because they’re expected to generally be more hard-working… why is it not communicated? Why cannot you opt in or out? Why does this generalisation automatically rewards lazy male workers while punishing hard-working women? How would you feel, if without your consent or even acknowledgment you were paid less than your peers because some study found out that you belong to a demographic that is on average a less profitable deal for your company on worked hours?
In response to your edit bugged comment.
I’m a little surprised at what my missus can do with her salary packing, although a fairly new benefit for her side of the industry.
We might not be laughing all the way to the bank, but it definetly takes a little pressure off.
Teachers certainly deserve the same in my opinion.
A position that requires that much unpaid overtime just to meet expectations is a complete joke.
The love of the job is hollow succour when it impacts so heavily.
Insert Ryan Reynolds face palm gif.
This ones a pisser
https://m.imgur.com/r/me_irl/B63Jpt9
When gender is now a social construct, How can there be a gender pay gap?
Because the pay gap is also a social construct? That’s a really weak attempt at waving away an issue with a made-up paradox.
Pretty sure it was just a cheap joke.
I hope the irony of releasing a game about The Wage Gap™ for free isn’t lost on these developers.
There’s a wage gap? No way, this is the first I’m hearing on this.
So you steal nothing then?
Wait, did they make a game where people of colour start stealing things? That seems… short sighted.