A new survey from Game Developer Magazine has highlighted how few women are in some disciplines within the industry and shown that in all but one field women are paid less than men.
The survey, scanned and uploaded by The Border House, shows that the 'Programmers and Engineers' as the well as the 'Audio Developer' disciplines within the game industry are the most heavily male-centric areas of game creation with just 4% of the workforces in these sectors being women.
Not far behind is the 'QA Testers' discipline where a mere 7% of people in this area are female.
The discipline with the highest porportion of female respondants is the 'Produces' field where 23% of those involved were women. This was followed by 'Business and Legal' at 18%, 'Artists and Animators' at 16% and 'Game Designers' at 11%.
There is also a significant difference between the sexes in relation to salaries. Male audio developers earn a staggering 65% more than their female counterparts. Men in the Business and Legal aspects of the game industry on average make 31% more than women in the same roles.
Male artists are on 29% more, male QA Testers take in 24.9% extra and male Game Designers are paid 23.6% more. The discipline with the smallest difference in wages is the role of Producer, which sees women, typically, earn 7.8% less than men.
The only sector of the industry which sees women recieve a higher wage than men is that of Programmers and Engineers where women are paid 4.5% extra.
Last month Media Molecule's Siobhan Reddy was named Australian Woman of the Year and said the win had encouraged her to think about "how I can encourage young woment to get into games." Reddy has also been included on the list of the UK's most powerful women by the BBC.
At the recent GDC Women in Games panel the speakers commented on the importance of game studios going into schools to encourage girls to join the industry warning that many women grow up never even considering a career in games to be an option.
Perhaps the industry's lack of diversity can be best highlighted by the fact that there was not one woman on stage during Sony's unveiling of the PlayStation 4. Although Sony is involved in the G.I.R.L Scholarship program which is designed to encourage women to join the industry.
Source: GamesIndustry.
