Rockstar North reveals women’s mean hourly rate 64% lower than men’s

The deadline for submission on the government’s Gender Pay Gap database passed at midnight yesterday, and while Team MCV are still going through the data, one company in particular has figures that make for grim reading.

Rockstar North, developers of Grand Theft Auto IV and V alongside scores of others, has reported that the mean hourly rate for women is 64 per cent lower than for men. The largest gender pay gap of any games firm that has so far released its figures.

This means that for every £1 a man at Rockstar earns, a woman earns just 36p.

While Rockstar North’s studio Director Andrew Semple commented:

“Rockstar North is fully committed to maintaining an equal opportunity work environment, where diversity is extremely highly valued and men and women are equally paid for equal work. Like much of the interactive entertainment industry, there is gender disparity in our workforce, particularly at senior levels where our team has been with us for many years. 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.”

The company’s median hourly rate has women making 31.8 per cent less than men, which is also one of the highest in the games industry, although not the highest, which is currently Sumo Digital.

These figures don’t indicate much about whether women working at the same job as a man are actually earning less at the company, but it does show that Rockstar North has a higher skew of men in senior positions, inflating the male figures with higher salaries. Of course, that’s actually the point. Based on the data, there aren’t many women at the top, with only 8% of the highest paid top quartile of employees at Rockstar identifying as women.

A source at Rockstar said: "I’d be sad if more women were put off from applying because of this."