If you follow video game news, you might be under the impression that equal opportunity and pay in the industry are worse than they’ve ever been. The narrative perpetuated by several industry websites paints a strikingly bleak picture of racial and gender disparities in the industry. Recent reports by GameIndustry.biz and Polygon highlighted these disparities based on a survey by the International Game Developers Association.
According to the reports, great disparities exist in the game industry with regards to racial and gender representation. White people are said to make up a disproportionate percentage of the people who work in the industry, and white men fill the bulk of high-paying positions and senior roles. The report also claims that women and people of minority ethnic groups are overrepresented on the lower rungs of the corporate ladders in the games industry.
Speaking to GameIndustry.biz, IGDA Executive Director Kate Edwards said that the game industry needs to more accurately reflect the demographics of gamers themselves.
“I think there’s an opportunity for the game industry to actually show some level of leadership, being an artistic-technical kind of industry that we are. We can actually make changes that better model those who are playing our games and using our products,” Edwards said. “While there are a lot of good programs out there attempting to do this, especially on local and regional levels, I think the industry as a whole needs to do even more and do a bigger push to try and attract more people of color, more women, and more people who should be a part of this industry.”
The survey that prompted all the hang-wringing was the IGDA’s 2015 Developer Satisfaction Survey, published earlier this month, of 3,000 people who work in the game industry. The majority of participants identified themselves as male. Of the remaining, 23% identified themselves as female and 2.5% as transgender or “other.” The survey was only conducted in North America and Europe, so it excludes data from Asia’s robust game industry in South Korea, China and Japan.
Given that the game industry employed over 146,000 people in the United States as of 2014, 3,000 would not seem to be a terribly representative sample. Additionally, the number of white respondents to the survey amounted to 67%, 5.4% less than the distribution of white people nationally (72.4%) in the United States. This means that slightly more non-white workers are employed in the game industry than one might expect. In other words, there is no real disparity in racial demographics—the numbers are what they should be.
A true disparity surfaces in the fact that only 81% of the developers surveyed identified as heterosexual, compared to 96.2% of the total U.S. population. In 2015, Gallup said the American public vastly overestimates the numbers of the gay, lesbian and transgender population. A third of the public believes that over 25% of the population is not heterosexual. The actual number is 3.8%. What this shows is that the game industry is much more diverse than one might expect.
With regards to pay, the survey suggested that white men make up 10% of the highest earners ($150k+) in the business, with women making up only 3%. The margins are smaller when grouped up by income ranges. It must be noted that the survey itself fails to differentiate between employers and regular employees; there is no special class for entrepreneurs who run their own studios and produce independent games.
Interestingly, the survey found that while a majority of white men and women believe that racial and gender diversity is important in the industry and in the workplace in general — as well as in game content — a much larger percentage of workers of color are neutral to the issues or consider them unimportant.
Contrary to the false narrative the game press attempts to promote, the survey found that workers of color consider the game industry to be more providing of equal opportunity in 2015 than in any previous year.
Additionally, 39% of survey participants indicated that they receive paid maternity leave, a much higher rate than the rest of the private sector. According to the US Department of Labor, only 12% of Americans who work for private companies have access to paid family leave. Working in the game industry is clearly much better for homemakers, but you’ll hardly hear the game press singing its praises.
Following the release of the report, some studios, including Sunless Sea developer Failbetter Games, have said they want to diversify their workforce. The studio expressed special interest in hiring women, members of black or minority ethnic backgrounds, and anyone who identifies as LGBTQIA+ with no previous experience or qualifications to serve in their paid internship program. While the program doesn’t specifically state that they intend to hire minorities over straight white males, even mentioning such qualifications means that they will matter in hiring.
The publication of the IGDA survey and its subsequent reports will undeniably affect the hiring policies (both visible and invisible) of other studios intending to correct the disparities they highlight. The fact that some disparities exist is undeniable, but it does the entire industry a disservice to blow them out of proportion.
