Image: Rockstar Games (Grand Theft Auto V)
A number of gaming companies in the UK employ women in roles which, on average, pay less than the ones their male colleagues are in according to a new UK government database. At Grand Theft Auto makers Rockstar North, the gap is particularly large.
At the studio based in Edinburgh, Scotland, the average hourly rate for women is 64% lower than for men while the median is 34% lower. This means that average hourly compensation for female employees is £0.36 for every £1 made by a man. (The average, or mean, is calculated by dividing total team income by number of workers, while the median looks at the income of the middle-ranked employee.)
These figures and others were provided to the UK government as part of a new requirement. Companies in the country with 250 employees or more are now required by law to submit data on the gender pay gaps within their workforce which are then logged in a public database.
Sony Interactive Entertainment Europe, Namco UK, and Electronic Arts all reported average gaps in hourly pay between men and women in the low teens, with Namco’s being the highest of the three at 14.5% and Microsoft’s being the lowest at 12.8%.
The UK’s median gender pay gap across all industries is 18.4% according to the Office of National Statistics as reported by the BBC. Meanwhile, companies like Starbucks and McDonald’s reported discrepancies in average pay in the single digits.
A breakdown of workers in each hourly pay quartile by gender based on data supplied by Rockstar North.Screenshot: GOV.UK
Part of the reason Rockstar North is such an outlier is due to the lack of women in high paying roles at the company. According to the database, only 8% of Rockstar North employees in the top quartile of hourly pay at the company are women.
Most of the women at the company work in roles at the lower end of the pay scale, with 21.4% of employees in the lowest quartile being women. The figures at companies like SIE Europe were much less lopsided.
Figures submitted by Electonric Arts.Screenshot: GOV.UK
It’s illegal in the UK for people performing the same work to be paid differently. As a result, pay gaps like the one at Rockstar North are more an indication of how few women work in the higher echelons of the company.
Figures submitted by SIE Europe. Screenshot: GOV.UK
Rockstar offered an explanation for the difference in a report filed along with the pay data.
“While our male and female employees are fairly compensated based on merit and without reference to gender, our gender pay gap is driven primarily by the structure of our workforce, with longer tenured employees who are predominately male occupying our most senior roles,” said the studio’s director, Andrew Semple.
A Rockstar rep reiterated that explanation in a statement to Kotaku and said the company is working to change things. “We are proactively working to decrease this disparity and we look forward to seeing representation of our female colleagues continue to grow in all roles and at all levels as we actively recruit, train and encourage women to pursue career opportunities at Rockstar North and within our industry.”
King, makers of Candy Crush Saga and all of its spin-offs, are also in the database, but under the name MidasPlayer.com. That company reports an average hourly gap of 13.5%.
The deadline for companies to file their reports has now expired. Large companies that refuse to report their gender pay gap figures could be subject prosecution or government inquiries.
Comments
84 responses to “Women Earn Significantly Less Money Than Men At Rockstar North, Among Other Gaming Companies ”
Rockstar makes the best games.
This statistics are on AVERAGE meaning what all man and women get paid and is most likely because there are more men than women
There are median stats as well, sport.
As they said, compensation is commensurate to seniority and experience, and most their more senior staff are males (not uncommon as it was not a popular field for women for a long time, and experience and seniority take time). You can’t go waving around %-based statistics about wages in a field where there were very few women applying for jobs in it for decades unless you are comparing it to males with the same level of experience and seniority. Data without perspective is useless, misinforming and harmful to the overall effort at achieving gender equality in the field.
You certainly can use percentage-based data when it compares like-for-like, as this article does. The companies compared are all in the same industry, and the discrepancies between Rockstar and the other two can’t be trivially explained away as ‘it’s just women not applying for jobs’. 22% of the game developers internationally are women, and Rockstar’s figures are significantly lower than that.
Except by doing that you would be dismissing the fact that the company that eventually became named Rockstar North was originally founded in 1984, a time period when very few females were interested in the field of game development, making senior mambers of the core team much more likely to be male and throwing off your wage curve. As i said, like for like can only really be applied to people of the same seniority, experience and position within the same company if you want to see genuinely applicable data.
I’m not dismissing it. Electronic Arts was founded in 1982 and its UK operation from 1987’s Bullfrog. SIA was founded in 1993, around the time when DMA started being traded around like a football. The three companies are comparable in age, it can’t be logically dismissed as ‘it was how it was at the time’.
Rockstar North, according to its report to the UK government, has 500-999 employees which makes its highest paid quartile 125-250 people. You can’t possibly believe the four founders of the company or the handful of employees they had in the 90s throw out the top quartile enough to be three times worse than Electronic Arts.
All three companies have long-standing staff in the upper ranks, all three have had more than 25 years to bring new blood in, but only one has figures significantly lower than the women game developer population.
All I got from this article was that the title of it should actually be, “Women and Men at Rockstar North earn the same if they’re doing the same job.”
But I guess I’d be bad at click-bait headlines.
The article is about how there are so few women in leadership and management. I can understand you wanting to be angry at the article because it’s about women’s income which seems to be aggravating to a lot of posters, but it’s forthright about the difference being between pay brackets. It’s also factually correct to assert that they earn less at Rockstar because they do as a result of not being in higher positions.
It’s an interesting article made more interesting by the UK’s commitment to making this stuff open and available.
I think they are saying the title is misleading by implying woman make less than their male counterparts, while the actual article deals with the fact that the female employees aren’t filling the higher paying roles.
To be fair, the title does use the word earn rather than “are paid” which implies that the women deserve the income they are getting.
BECUASE THEY DONT WANT THEM? no that cant be right FPORCE THEM TO GET JOB THAT ARE WOST FOR THEM < DO IT! DO IT NOW!
thats the actical in a nut shell.
The majority of the article was actually interesting… But it’s absolutely brought down by a headline and a couple of lines that do it a disservice by plugging the typical “Gender pay gap!” bullshit, misrepresenting the context of the situation for click-bait purposes.
I think the fact that there’s such a massive disparity between the amount of men and women in such fields is an issue we should always work to resolve.
But acting as if a woman will be paid less just because she’s female, when it actually isn’t the case, isn’t really a good way to convince women to work in that field now is it?
Discrepancies in representation across pay brackets and tiers of management is part of the broader gender pay gap problem. ‘Same pay for same work’ is just one part of the issue, not the entirety of it.
The article is about the lack of Gender Diversity at Rockstar, while the headline suggests is about pay imbalances.
Good article none the less. Businesses all over the world are looking at ways to improve their Gender Diversity, and it looks like Rockstar are no different. I’d suggest the majority of major studios are facing similar challenges – they’re not based in the UK, so are not subject to the same mandatory report.
Correct, and at some point we need to realize that equality of outcome in this instance, ie. 50% female and 50% male workers at Rockstar and equal distribution in seniority/roles/pay – may not even be possible because we’re assuming the same amount of women to men want to work there and want those roles.
And that is part of the problem too, more women would have to organically want to work at Rockstar to correct this imbalance without it being a case of forced equality of outcome.
It seems Rockstar is complying with the law, has stated that they are doing their best to decrease the disparity, and no news has come out of gender discrimination in hiring or promotion practices, so what more can they do except go out and force women into these roles – is that what we want?
We should be focused on equality of opportunity not equality of outcome. As long as men and women have equal opportunity then that is the best we can do because at some point the decision to work in this industry, for Rockstar, and to strive for those higher paying positions rests with the individual – you can’t force that.
Furthermore, some of the arguments here from what appear to be white knights just come across as completely out of touch with reality. Do they think women are incompetent, and unable to get into these positions and organizations themselves without the help of men or the game being changed? Because that’s how it comes across in some arguments.
Women are just as capable as men, they have the capacity to excel in these roles and compete with men. And in todays workplace they also have ample opportunities to do so, but these sorts of shifts in industry representation take time and also require a shift in the career goals of younger women – who would need to choose to work in the games industry (And for Rockstar in this instance).
What frustrates me is these articles are always taken the wrong way by certain crowds who are already hellbent on an agenda of further dividing men and women, or completely misunderstand the “gender pay gap.”
If we learn that Rockstar are discriminating against the hiring and promotion of female workers then that is entirely a different issue and one that they would face legal ramifications for. If they are paying their female workers less for the same work male workers do then that is illegal and they would face pretty severe punishment (and backlash) I would imagine.
Which is why most big organisations aren’t setting 50/50 as their target. They’re aiming for improving the current figure rather than leaping feet first into the fire.
For example, I work for a major Agriculture (another heavily male dominated industry) organisation, and our target is a 6% increase over 3 years. That is far more likely than the 25% increase we’d need to get to 50/50.
If that’s all you got from the article, you read very little of the article.
Sounds like Rockstar need to IMMEDIATELY stop hiring and promoting staff on merit/skill and start hiring and promoting based on gender only.
That’ll fix the problem, right?
But if the employee male or female does the same job… They get the same pay, right?
So it isn’t a gender pay gap.
It’s women in the company haven’t gone up into higher managerial roles.
So there’s no pay gap at all… It’s a gap in promotions into manager positions
That is still a pay gap. It’s generally harder for women to get promoted in workplaces with a lot of men, or a historically male managerial structure. It will change over time, but saying women not having access to managerial or leadership positions is not equivalent to a gap in income is facetious.
I’m not being facetious. I think it’s a serious issue.
But I don’t think it’s a pay gap at all. If they do the same role and get paid the same amount it’s not about pay, it’s about the balance of gender ratio of corporate responsibility and managing.
But I’d also suspect within a video game company that is predominately male in programming roles, and they’ve been promoted from that position it makes sense that it would be male dominated.
It’s just like the hospital I work at, it’s mostly female nurses and basically no men. So from there nurses have got promoted into managerial roles…. And nearly all managers here are women.
Makes sense.
And I would definitely not claim a pay gap here. Yet if I did the maths women would make far more than men in my workplace.
Oh dear. Drop it mate. It is not facetious, it is factual. If a woman is being paid the same amount as a man and EVERY OTHER parameter is equal (where it is illegal to not do so). There is no pay gap. The fact that there are less women in higher positions is irrelevant when talking about a “gender wage gap”.
A man in a higher position gets paid more than a man on a lower position. We going to “fix” that also?
Those women have the same opportunity to further their career just the same as men. In fact, Jordan Peterson outlined it rather well in his “interview” with Cathy Newman as to why men are generally promoted over women when all other things are equal.
Jordan Peterson… here we go.
Jordan Peterson, the tough internet daddy for boys whose daddies don’t love them 🙁
I am sorry that he doesn’t believe your feelings take precedence over facts.
It’s fine to assert that women take lower paying jobs as a choice, but there’s little fact behind that assertion. It also doesn’t account for women that want to get work in male dominated fields and can not due to institutional issues. You can very easily reconcile women with children working part time and this information given here, which is clearly not women wanting to work part time, but instead women that want careers in games. They are not the same samples.
It was only a reply about Jordan Peterson, who I believe makes decent arguments about a lot of subjects (just not about female agency over sexuality and presentation in the work place).
If they are not being promoted purely because they are female then that is an issue.
@vaegrand sorry ran out of reply space. I am replying to Peterson’s assertions about women at work. Yes, there was a carer imperative in the past that meant women elected to take particular jobs, but those jobs aren’t in this industry. I don’t accept that this relates to professional workers like the ones that are in gaming (or in law which is where I come from) and there are extremes in income disparity among these workers.
I also don’t think focusing on women as CEOs and stuff is helpful either and that the problem needs to be viewed institutionally and broadly. There is still the notion of “women’s work” which has always been poorly paid and in a silo, even for women with no kids and a total embrace of the will to power.
There’s nothing fact-based in basically anything Peterson has written. His ramblings amount to little more than fraudulent guruism wrapped in valueless truisms like “tell the truth” and “clean your room”, meaningless nonsense like “build the crystal palace” and “confront death with courage and return”, and dogmatic religious drivel like “offer your sons as sacrifice to god”.
Please don’t tell me you actually put stock in this modern conman.
There are plenty of evidence to his teachings, from muliple sources and looking at different psychological facets. Personality variables, prevalence of disorders, responses to treatment, how genes and hormones create different behavioural outcomes, differences in aggression and empathy, so on and so on. Peterson stresses the point that sociological constructs can have a biological, genetic and neurological basis and that current social trends in relation to race, gender, politics shouldn’t discount this idea.
In relation to this topic: I see the ratio between men and women increase as pay increases which is incorrect, one would like the ratio to stay the same. As for less women in the field, look at the universities to determine graduation ratios, then determine why these ratios are the way they are. A strong predictor are personality traits and intelligence. While women can perform as well as men in STEM fields they excel in fields about interpersonal relationships and will gravitate to those roles. That’s why the majority of psychology and sociology grads are women and the gender ratio is more balanced towards women.
Final note: Businesses and the capitalist system is designed in relation to market dominance and aggression. Once your at the top a certain ruthlessness is required. Women on average are not as ruthless (but to discount their usefulness in a top position is folly, diversity and perspectives promotes growth).
@colonelwhisky I’d love to see the actual non-circumstantial evidence in favour of the Jungian notion of universal archetypal myth that seems to be a core pillar that Peterson builds almost all of his subsequent assumptions and assertions on, because it’s not supported by any modern peer-reviewed psychology I can find.
The other major problem with what you’ve detailed there is what evidence does exist about behavioural constructs doesn’t say what Peterson tells you they say. Peterson incorrectly attributes to what you call ‘biological, genetic and neurological bases’ behaviours without properly separating them from the much stronger influence of current culture and pushing a ‘nature over nurture’ mentality that is neither supported by the evidence, nor by most of the rest of the psychology community. His conclusions are scientifically faulty, the only reason they’re popular is because they falsely reassure insecure men that their dreams of innate superiority are scientifically validated.
It’s not difficult to find trained professionals in the psychology field criticising and debunking Peterson’s body of work or otherwise contradicting his conclusions. Cognitive scientist Paul Thagard debunks the central pillars that hold up most of Peterson’s work in this article, for example, and concludes “Peterson’s ideas are a mishmash of banal self-help, amateur philosophy, superfluous Christian mythology, evidence-free Jungian psychology, and toxic individualistic politics. Seek enlightenment elsewhere”. In terms of evidence, this 2005 review of 46 meta-analyses, themselves composed of over a hundred separate studies, concluded that extensive evidence supports the gender similarity hypothesis – that there is almost no psychological difference between men and women.
So respectfully no, there is not ‘plenty of evidence’ to his teachings. There is bad science, faulty interpretations of multifaceted data and total lack of concurrence from the rest of the scientific fields he claims to draw on.
I have to say that I have come to expect from you better than casually dropping the douchebag argument “well, my point is logic-based and yours is emotional-based, so we all know who won”, especially when the dismissed “feelings” are assumed.
Here is my problem, in a country where there are real issues I rarely have much interests in how people feel. I get that mental wellbeing is important, but when I live in a region where the largest health org is literally a dialysis focused health centre. Which makes me pretty jaded towards people and thus someone like Jordan Peterson makes a lot of sense to me (with the exception of a couple of his opinions about women).
Also I didn’t dismiss anyones opinion, I merely white knighted for Jordan Peterson, which I hoped would come across as a joke as most of his points on social etiquette is that we shouldn’t take into account what other people think.
@vaegrand
I can understand that even if I don’t agree, but that’s definitely the realm of subjective opinions. The dismissal I was calling out was the reduction of other’s people arguments to being “feelings”, something I have an issue with:
First, it presupposes that feelings are inherently irrelevant (if not altogheter wrong), but they are not. For example, you admit that your arguments are coloured by being jaded by the circumstances existing where you live. That IS a feeling, and I’m not going to say that you are incorrect for having it or that it makes your whole argument unworthy of consideration.
Second, since in this case in particular, the other posters hadn’t shown any remarkable inclination for emotion in their arguments, this label of “feelings” was a facile and undeserved dismissal that served to label their position as inherently wrong or at least illogical, making the opposing one right on principle. That is the part that made me disappointed as I know that you can argument better than that.
I went into moderation hell so I’ll just post again :
I’m not being facetious. I think it’s a serious issue.
But I don’t think it’s a pay gap at all. If they do the same role and get paid the same amount it’s not about pay, it’s about the balance of gender ratio of corporate responsibility and managing.
But I’d also suspect within a video game company that is predominately male in regards to programming roles, and they’ve been promoted from that position it makes sense that it would be male dominated.
It’s just like the hospital I work at, it’s mostly female nurses and basically no men. So from there nurses have got promoted into managerial roles…. And nearly all managers here are women.
Makes sense.
And I would definitely not claim a pay gap here. Yet if I did the maths women would make far more than men in my workplace.
Women and men have different levels of access to work. They have different incomes because of this. I also work in a beautiful anecdote where the woman are by and large making more money than men. I think it’s great. I don’t overlay this personal experience onto a whole society which demonstrably rewards men with more income than women across the board.
Full time women earn less money, this doesn’t include home carers or part timers that skew the income disparity further. I don’t think it’s fair to include them in the argument, but I still think it’s worth keeping them in mind.
This issue is wholly one of income disparity. A pay gap.
Haha I’m not putting out that ‘beautiful anecdote’ and then saying therefore a gap doesn’t exist.
I’m not playing anything down at all..
I’m just saying that the situation at rockstar makes a lot of sense to me. I think it’s not coming from a place of sexism or denying women higher roles.
The team started out as a bunch of young guys making games in their garage…
The team grows bigger and at the time predominately men get into programming and video games.
Fast forward years later those founding men have higher positions and pay than those who started in the last however many years. Makes sense to me.
Are we really upset that men were more interested in video games 20 years ago than women? Is that really the companies fault?
That might be a persuasive argument if other video game companies (including the two others specifically charted in the article) didn’t have significantly better ratios of representation. There’s evidently more than just ‘natural talent-driven growth’ involved when Sony has more than double Rockstar’s representation of women in the top earning bracket and even long-time industry scumbag Electronic Arts has more than triple the representation of women in that bracket.
In their defence, it’s possible Rockstar has started to try to fix this problem already but not enough time has passed so their burst of new women recruits are still padding out the bottom bracket. Unfortunately even their bottom bracket doesn’t reflect that 22% of game developers internationally are women. If they’ve started making strides then that’s great, but it still leaves the question of why other companies have been able to have double or triple the results in the same industry. I think even the best reading of the situation still suggests Rockstar dragged their feet on improving diversity in their workplace when others were already making improvements.
What if women just don’t want to work at Rockstar compared to the competitors you’ve mentioned? The company rep states in the article they’re doing their best to decrease the disparity – or do you feel they are lying?
There is a lot of arguing here about the gender pay gap debate, but the article clearly states that in the UK it is illegal for people performing the same work to be paid differently – so women obviously are not performing the same work at Rockstar which is why they’re being paid less on average.
So, this becomes an issue of gender representation among the various hierarchical tiers and roles within the Rockstar organisation. I suppose that’s what the gender pay gap issue boils down to in most companies because I have a feeling most modern western societies have similar laws to that of the UK – that it is illegal for men and women to be paid differently for the exact same work.
Is the solution that Rockstar spends money to try and make themselves more attractive to potential female employees? Do they spend time to try and onboard more female staff? Do they spend resources encouraging females in their company to try and attain higher paid positions? How do they balance this and justify this? What impact will it have on male co-workers looking to move into similar roles?
And ultimately – why would they do any of the above? They haven’t broken the law, and so far there is no news that they have discriminatory hiring/promotion practices. A rep has stated they are doing their best to increase representation.
It’s a very complicated issue – and again, that’s assuming that those females workers would even want to move into some of the higher paying roles.
If we discover that Rockstar is paying female workers less for the exact same work as male workers, or that they have discriminatory hiring practices, then action should be taken and we have a real reason to be up in arms.
I can only hope that with time more women will perhaps become interested in video game development and pursue or continue to build careers in this field, but as to how to ‘fix’ what is outlined in the article I don’t have an answer beyond that, do you? What you would change at Rockstar beyond the typical programs to encourage females to join the company and initiatives to try and promote and foster the talents of all employees?
The problem about sexism is that much like racism, it has become normalised and institutionalised to certain degrees. If you were raised in an environment that constantly suggested the notion that women are less capable/less intelligent/more emotional/more vapid etc than men, wouldn’t it shape the way to make decisions even subconsciously? And if you are an HR manager and you have in front of you the CVs of equally capable men and women, wouldn’t it mean than more times than not you’d be inclined to hire/give a raise to the men, all while your brain makes up perfectly valid, non-sexist justifications to do so? (And that if the HR person in question is just your average Joe, as opposed to a dyed in the wool mysoginist, which both you and I know that they exist).
So while nobody is blaming Rockstar of anything yet, the fact that the average is so starkly removed from expectations warrant a closer look. Could it be simply the reasons that you mention? For sure. But Rockstar and other companies would do well using these results to carefully inspecting within to make sure that biases (conscious or not) are not part of the issue.
These stats also don’t include men crippled or killed at work who no longer earn a living.
Dead people don’t factor into the stats. Very astute.
Yes, it is an issue of income disparity, a pay gap, that exists between men and women, women and women, and men and men – because we’re talking about different pay for different roles/seniority – not different pay for the exact same job.
I think as a society we need to do our best to ensure equal opportunities for men and women from the very beginning of education all the way through to adulthood and employment. Men and women need to be exposed to the same potential career paths from a young age and have equal fostering of individual skills and interests.
From what I can see, this is happening in our schools and in our job opportunities. I don’t recall seeing an ad on Seek that says, “Men only”, and I don’t recall a school only allowing the boy students to access computer labs at lunchtime. But I do believe we can still do more at home as parents to not pigeonhole our kids into some of these gender/career stereotypes that parents in previous generations have done.
Regarding the pay difference for men and women: it’s illegal to pay women less than men for the same work – the article even states this. It’s also illegal to discriminate against potential job candidates based on gender. So I disagree that women and men have “different levels of access to work”, if I’m understanding what you mean by ‘access’ correctly.
Gaming is still more predominantly the domain of men because of individual interests, and perhaps we could do more to introduce women to gaming from a younger age to help foster some interest there (and that starts at home I feel, where we can all make an impact).
The “beautiful anecdote” industry you work in is imbalanced then as well, if you’re arguing for equality of outcome in one instance then you should be just as concerned for the male workers at your company as you are for the females at Rockstar. We are all human. I can’t stand this nonsense that just further stokes the flames of division between men and women.
It’s already been addressed many times why women earn less than men in the same industries and even in the same businesses, and it’s not because they are being paid less for the same work (which again – is illegal). Yet so many still think that this is the case – why? Because of articles like this being misread or misinterpreted.
Lastly, do you feel women are lesser than men? Do you feel women need help from men to ‘correct’ these imbalances? I don’t. I feel that men and women have equal capacity and each individual has a choice (and opportunity) to decide what career path they want. Right now there are less women in gaming and the gaming industry, this may change over time. Right now there are less women working at Rockstar then the competitors, this may change over time.
But the same opportunities for work exist in this industry and this company, do they not?
As an IR practitioner I can tell you that industrial law is always followed and that boards, managers and owners always promote women at the same rate and they never do the wrong thing.
Ahahahaha
But the gender pay gap is a myth, according to numerous unattractive angry white men on the internet who post ‘authoritative figures’ which are somehow different to the ‘authoritative figures’ that show it’s real.
Granted, their arguments always spuriously ignore the reality of promotion structure and hiring ratios and simply look at the wage paid for a given position, but there are SO MANY of these guys and they are SO OUTRAGED that they can’t ALL be horrible little misogynist trolls, can they?
Can they?
I mean, are you?
No but you see all the women in my sewing room earn the same amount, so I am factually not better off than them and there is no imbalance in our income because we do different jobs.
What? Did you even read the article or are you just here to stir shit up?
I won’t give you any figures, just a quote from this article;
When the only pay gap that exists is one between junior staff and senior staff, it’s not really a “gender pay gap” but a seniority pay gap that exists in every industry outside communist nations…
I’m really not even sure what you expect to happen here, should they simply fire all their senior staff so they can find some new females to promote? Should they be creating new senior positions just for females (even if they don’t need/can’t afford more random positions)? Or do you think they should simply be paying their junior female staff far more to compensate for the average pay gep? Because that last one really would create a gender pay gap with females being paid more than males for the same work…
Both of those differ for each indivual business so any real discussion on them is mostly pointless (I mean, I know of one dev team that only hires women. Not much I know but just showing each business to their own). I can say that as far as hiring ratios in the games industry, as a games student, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s around 1 female student per every 10 males. You can’t blame hiring ratios entirely on businesses (in most cases) when there are almost no females even entering the industry.
Also if you were talking more generally (hard to tell since your comment is completely general and practically unrelated to the article), we can look at other industries, how about Childcare? Men have an impossible time getting a job and when they finally do, they are often treated like shit, kept from promotions and eventually forced out. Because of this there’s almost no men in higher positions either so the average pay gap is skewed towards women.
We never hear much about this though because (well partially because people like you don’t care about men having a hard time but mostly) the simple fact is the men at those low positions are still paid the same as the women at the same positions – so it’s not seen as a gender pay gap.
I’m not outraged, just pointing out how things really are. If that makes me seem sexist to the guy yelling about angry white trolls on a gaming forum, I’m sure I can live with it.
I like the bit where you *almost* understood what was going on, but then you back away into that wall of text – and then rallied by plonking up that bit about industries where the pay gap goes the other way, but then your brain shied away from actually putting these things together.
I mean if you can see the issue in industries where women are privileged, what cognitive dysfunction prevents you from seeing THE EXACT SAME THING happening in vastly more industries?
And then you say this:
‘so it’s not seen as a gender pay gap.’
Exactly. Of course it IS a gender pay gap when in a given industry a certain gender gets the majority of higher paying roles either due to simple bias or due to cultural patterning.
But as per 80% of the comments here, as long as a given role has the same pay no matter the gender, it’s not seen as a gender pay gap.
Your post is a study in the bizarre psychology at work here. It’s almost like intelligent middle class males understand the issue one way, but seem to have trouble translating it to situations where they benefit.
thats not a pay gap based on gender, its a pay gap based on skill and qualifications.
Can you please explain how you would resolve the pay gap issue?
I didn’t Italicize “seen” because I didn’t intend for it to be read that way (although I’m sure you already knew that). I meant, it isn’t seen as a gender pay gap for the same reason as the gap in this article isn’t by most people (80% of comments as you said) – because it is not a gender pay gap.
Gender pay gap has traditionally been used to define the difference in pay for a woman doing the same work as a man and getting paid less – that is not happening here, it’s not even legal in Australia (or UK according to this article). Shouting about pay gaps is nonsensical because pay isn’t the issue.
What does still exist, causing these average pay differences, is a gender job gap (or gender seniority gap if you prefer). As mentioned earlier, the only way to really fix the problem is to ensure women are afforded the same hiring and promotion opportunities as men and let it balance over time. Trying to speed the balance up by promoting based solely on gender would just be more of the same problem that got us into this shitty situation in the first place.
Maybe I don’t understand, or maybe I just can’t translate my understanding correctly like you say but hey, at least I’m not one of those who come to defend the downtrodden, only to insult everyone else and fail to provide any actual solutions.
There are hordes of gormless fuckheads that can’t reach beyond popular pseudo-philosophers and engage with concepts larger than their own experience. They just engage in a definitional debate of what a pay gap is because they’re either unwilling to engage or flatly misunderstand the rigour of criticism. Hence the people that downvote even the most benign, contemplative post because it isn’t a Reddit philosophy talking point.
That’s pretty much what you’re doing… spouting insults and innane crap while ignoring the actual issue and the fact that this ‘pay gap’ has nothing to do with pay (as paying more for junior staff just due to gender would not solve the problem) and therefor calling it a ‘pay gap’ just creates arguments rather than solving the problem.
The solution already exists – give women the same opportunities as men – it just isn’t one that works overnight, or even in any reasonably short period of time as progressing from student>junior staff>senior staff> management/owner/executive takes years for any individual. So even if all businesses were doing the right thing now, it’ll take some time to filter through – and I don’t think anyone will deny that 99% of big business has been male-controlled in the past.
Of course if you aren’t happy with this solution you are free to provide your own alternative, or you could just continue ranting about how horrible everyone is for not engaging with an issue that you can’t seem to be bothered engaging with yourself.
I’ve made several lengthy posts about this and I’ve been moderated because people are downvoting contemplative posts about the issue. The fix must be societal and institutional, good on you for identifying that.
I didn’t read your post but it’s literally about codifying a pay and job gap lmao, no wonder you thought my post was addressing you and not just a comment to burnside.
“The solution already exists – give women the same opportunities as men”
This is not a solution. Emerging from centuries of second-class treatment in employment terms and then saying ‘well you have the same opportunities now so problem solved’ is like breaking the legs of some of the runners before a race and then saying ‘well you’re both on the same starting line so problem solved’. That kind of ‘equal’ opportunity is a start but it does nothing to fix the imbalance created by past injustice whatsoever.
The real solution involves compensating for the injustices of the past too. In this analogy that means treating the wounded runners to get them back on the same level as everyone else. It may well seem to some of the healthy runners that those wounded runners are getting ‘special treatment’, but it should be obvious why it’s necessary to ensure the fairest outcome for the race.
So your idea of equality is to just tilt the scales in the opposite direction? Sorry but that’s not equality, it’s just another form of sexism.
Women have fought for years to be hired or promoted based on merits rather than gender, now you’re saying the best way to correct that previous injustice is to hire/promote them based solely on gender?
For the record, your analogy is rubbish, by saying one is disabled in the race it isn’t an injury of the past but a current one. A more accurate analogy would be someone who did have a leg injury but then recovered – no those people do not get special treatment in races. We should give them help to get them back on their feet (the same help we would give anyone who has fallen down) but once they get there, why should they be treated any differently than the rest?
My idea of real equality is to correct past imbalances so that things are genuinely equal. I’m sure you’ve seen this comic before, it sums up why equal treatment in isolation is ineffective. You need to equalise the baseline first to be able to accurately assess merit in the first place.
The analogy I provided is apt. It addresses women as a collective whole, not as individual cases. As a whole, women are currently still suffering from an injury caused by past injustice, and actions that seek to correct for that injury do so with the goal of getting both men and women to the same baseline from which an equal starting point produces an actually fair result.
The simple equality you’re talking about is just putting them on the same starting line, and ignoring that one’s injured and on the ground and the other isn’t. You say we should help them back on their feet and that’s exactly what we’re doing, because that’s not where they are right now. To healthy runners that appears to be special treatment (‘they’re getting something I’m not getting’) when the reality is that help is simply to get them to the same baseline those healthy runners were already at.
Equal treatment without an equal baseline only prevents the gap between men and women from getting larger, which is at least an improvement on before, but it does nothing to close the gap. The notion that simple equality will solve the problem without factoring that gap is, with no disrespect intended, oversimplistic and naive at best.
Congratulations, you’ve encountered Burnside, Kotaku AU’s dedicated lefty troll.
His M.O includes:
a) only posting on articles that are political (see: gender, females in gaming, trans issues, race issues, homosexuality and similar topics)
b) almost exclusively replying in EXTREME sarcasm. seemingly incapable of polite discussion on the internet with people he disagrees with
c) usually uses the same keywords as pejoratives, to describe his enemies (people who disagree with him), including “white” “straight” “male” and “weeb/weeaboos” because liking anime is also a sin
d) if you disagree with him, you’re on the right and therefore evil. think you voted for labor or the greens? nope, you’re a righty conservative and you’re on the wrong side of history! You probably would have voted Trump if you could!
Seriously, you go through his post history and you’ll be impressed how right these 4 points are. Or depressed, because it’s pretty sad. In particular A and B. So vitriolic and toxic to conversation.
High praise from the man who has upvoted possibly every single misogynist, racist, and plain bigoted post on this website.
‘Conversation’?
You mean where you and the same pack of alt-righters downvote anyone who disagrees with them in order to censor them?
Please.
I’ve never understood the unattractive = mean association. We ugly people just tryna live our life, why do people like you insist on grouping us with mean people?
Ah, I always love the drama that follows when anyone implies that rockstar, the studio that’s famous for what many people know as “that game where you can run over hookers” might be a little sexist.
You can run over men too.
I’m very curious to hear solutions people have for this issue. I read a lot of articles that mention the opportunity differences between genders but rarely hear a solution proposed.
Came here to see MRA apologists talk Jordan Peterson’s pop psychology as the antidote to thousands of papers based on actual research.
Was not disappointed.
There are thousands of papers based on actual “research” that says the earth is flat.
Yeah and the ones from this century were probably written by Peterson as a thought provoking youtube for ten year olds.
Do you have links to any peer-reviewed papers that conclude that? I’d genuinely like to give them a read.
That was sarcasm, peer reviewed papers can no longer be trusted purely because they are peer review. One of many scandals, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-papers-systematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/?utm_term=.6b073071e30e
Also if your getting peer review by like minded people you lose objectivity, I will concede that peer reviewed scholarly papers are typically more reliable than your basic opinion piece or Wikipedia.
That being said there might just be a peer review paper of flat earth, it would not surprise me at all.
My point is that you can’t trust anyone or anything any more.
Peer review was never an impenetrable shield, just a standard of verification higher than ‘nobody has actually checked this’. More important is falsifiability, one of the essential components of the scientific method. Anyone can test falsifiable conclusions regardless of their bias or political leaning, and in a globally connected scientific community that means a very diverse pool of potential sources of rebuttal.
I was genuinely curious if you had any actual papers that follow the scientific method and conclude the earth is flat though. I ask because it’s a bit of a myth that science thought the earth was flat until Columbus; in reality scholars knew the earth was spherical since at least ancient Greece, with some circumstantial evidence that the Egyptians understood the concept as well, and European consensus was for a spherical earth long before Columbus was even born.
Caution with science is of course important, but I think you’re pushing too far in the other direction by claiming you can’t trust it at all. The majority of science goes through rigorous verification and retesting and faulty conclusions, especially in busier areas of research, are generally identified and expunged quickly and efficiently.
I should rephrase, blindly trust.
In my first uni course of my degree I was marked down pretty hard for not having enough sources of information in my citations and for not checking the sources in which the papers made there conclusions.
It lead me to better vet the papers I referenced from that point onward, even though they were all still peer reviewed, guess it made me very sceptical about everything.
Also made me expect the worst in people, I pretty much just assume everyone has an agenda of some sort until I listen a bit more or get to know them better.
But no I was being 100% sarcastic about flat earth, it was generally accepted by astronomers hundreds of years before even before Christ was born that the earth was round, it just couldn’t be definitively proven until Pythagoras or maybe Aristotle, don’t remember watched a documentary on it ages ago.
If I may share on the nature of “peer” review. First and foremost, you say you’re a student so I’m assuming you’re around an undergrad level. My apologies in advance if you’re actually in the Honors – PhD – candidate level.
@zombiejesus described it best as a means of verification.
The problem is the peer reviews these days are less about verification of the truth (again as he pointed out) and from what I’ve seen from personal experience, it’s more political verification.
Back in the day like my co-workers we used to work our arses off to try and get published. I still hate the expression “publish or perish” to this day because it favours quantity over quality and effectively tries to motivate up-and-coming academics to play those same political games.
I’m not going to name names, but I do know from experience that some outlets have a bias to their preferred field yet one is still expected to have a publication in those “leading” outlets.
So while I don’t condone or even like that false outcomes are reported, I still understand why they happen.
I came here to observe a seemingly fundamental misunderstanding of an article’s core themes and topics by the KotakAU community.
In a way, I was disappointed.