Right, let’s try this again….

Okay, Dido was probably making me feel a bit melancholy, so I’m going to try this entry to the tune of…Björk.

Started off my day leafing through the new Game Developer magazine…I thought, yeah, pretty pictures, uncontroversial content (for me at least), eeeeaaase my way into the day. I woke up with a headache this morning, so I needed eeeeaaaassing. I’m making tea right now, in an effort to patch up that headache with some caffeine – “teacher, mother, secret lover”.

Turns out this copy of Game Developer includes their annual salary review. I’m thinking ‘hey, pretty lucrative field, especially since these are U.S. figures’. Then I notice a little pie chart beside the breakdowns for each field (art, programming, production)… salary breakdown for women vs. men.

Huh.

Big fat discrepancies in each category. A $15,000 difference as producers, almost $5,000 as programmers, $6,000 in design, and so on. Only one exception – in Quality Assurance, women make almost $3,000 more than men.

Overall though, women’s salaries lagged at $0.87 to men’s $1.00.

Thinking critically, there are a few things to feel hopeful about. One, is that I believe in equal pay for equal work. The game industry is young. And a real presence of women in the industry is even younger. It is possible that we are seeing a bit of catch up since women, as a demographic, are still more likely to have less experience. And less experience tends to translate into lower salary.

Unfortunately, the $0.87 is actually less than in 2002 when the survey found women had salaries of $0.89 to the dollar. Again, I am hopeful that this is actually an indicator of hiring more women at a junior level. Maybe. Something to keep an eye on.

I experienced a weird flip as I kept reading, and I suddenly decided the game industry was progressive in paying women $0.89. The U.S. Labour Department’s Labour Stats have the male-female wage gap as $1.00 to $0.78.

These are numbers for the States, so I felt compelled to see how Canada measures up. In 1999, the gap was 30.1%. For every $100 a man took home, a woman earned $70.

The Government of Canada’s Pay Equity Review made this comment:
“…although the male-female wage gap has narrowed over the past few decades, a persistent unexplainable male-female wage gap continues to exist. After accounting for gender differences in work history and other factors, the study concludes that approximately one half to three-quarters of the gender wage gap cannot be explained. This unexplained portion of the gender wage gap is commonly referred to as the pay equity wage gap.”

SIGH.

A theme that will keep coming up as I keep making blog entries is my deer-in-the-headlights shock at how the world works. I’ve been around a few blocks, so I’m not as doey-eyed innocent as I was. But I’m still a part of that generation of young women coming into their own now – you know the ones, we grew up in the 70s and 80s, and were part of the inculcation of new ideals.

We listed to “Free to Be, You and Me”, wore cordoruys, and watched a Sesame Street that showed ethnic diversity. We started soccer and hockey teams. Our dads helped do dishes. Some of us played co-operative board games…

We were also taught that all people should be treated equally. That women can be whatever they want to be. I didn’t realize just how deeply those ideas had burrowed into me. And I think you don’t until you see that the world isn’t actually that way.

Not that we were so delusional to think that the world was *already* there, and we were just plugging into it. I think we thought that we were part of a momentum of change, but an inevitable momentum. Like there had been some sort of consensus that had happened before I was born, where everyone said, “yup, this is the way to go”, and we were just following through.

But that ain’t the case starfish. There is more momentum than there has been in a long time, but there is also a resistance and a whole pile of ugly that doesn’t want to get swept away. Power is comfortable, consensus is hard, and simple solutions don’t fix complex problems.

However. I’m here. And those ‘hippie’ parents might have planted something of a false reality, but a part of that was planting a real expectation. Women of my generation see themselves as fundamentally entitled to all those good things like equal pay and opportunity. We’re shocked and indignant when someone says that we can’t have it. We ask why, and expect a reasonable answer.

And I think that’s a step in the right direction.