Gender pay gap in UK games still wide at 17.1% for 2021
Marie Dealessandri
Features Editor
Wednesday 6th April 2022
The deadline for some UK-based companies to release their gender pay gap reports arrived this week, with games firms still displaying a concerning wage disparity between men and women.
Companies employing more than 250 people are legally required to provide such data, with around 23 game firms represented as part of the figures available this year, which gives a snapshot of the industry from April 2021.
The median gender wage disparity in games was 17.1% for 2021. As a comparison, the gap among full-time employees across all professions in the UK was 7.9%, up from 7% in 2020 -- it did increase to 15.4% when including part-time employees though.
It's worth noting that due to the gender pay gap report process focusing solely on the disparity between men and women, these figures do not include non-binary people employed in the UK games industry.
GamesIndustry.biz looked into over 20 companies, although there were notable firms missing -- including Keywords and Rebellion, among others.
Of those who reported, Sumo Digital had the largest median wage gap at 36.1% -- this is up from 23.4% in 2020. Women represented only 8.1% of the highest paid jobs quarter at the company -- however, this is an improvement from 5.8% in 2020. Women represented 36% of the of the lowest paid jobs at Sumo, up from 23.4%.
Sumo Digital's managing director Gary Dunn justified this discrepancy by saying that it's a "reflection of the efforts that have been made at recruiting women into the business at grassroots level." He acknowledged that "there is still much work to do."
Sumo was followed by Improbable, where women's median hourly pay was 28.5% lower than men's. Women occupied 8% of the highest paid
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