The pay gap is different for every game you play, but it’s always there. This is the gender pay gap in action, in a 1998 video game. And just like in real life, men are more likely to ask for bigger pay rises and start from a higher base. Not only do you have to hire more people to make your hospital run effectively, but you also need to retain them - before they all apparently run off to be game developers for better money.ĭoctors, nurses and caretakers all demand wage increases as their skills increase or their environment worsens: just like in real life. Lessons in gender pay gapsĪ little way into Theme Hospital and the game mechanics slowly get more complex. Having said that, even today there isn’t gender parity in the medical profession - with doctors still being predominantly men 2 - so who knows? Maybe it had a bigger impact than we will ever realise. Theme Hospital taught millennials, growing up in the age of mass-consumer technology, that doctors are men and nurses are women.ĭespite its success, Theme Hospital probably didn’t shape anyone’s entire perception of ‘boys jobs’ and ‘girls jobs’ in the medical profession. Suddenly the choice of gender looks remarkably like a deliberate stereotyping rather than a technical constraint. The caretakers, similarly to the receptionists, are always the same homogenous, older men. There’s ethnic and age diversity amongst the nurses too, but they are only ever of one gender. When you get a little further into the first level, you start hiring nurses and caretakers. Even the ‘assistant’ - who is a man - is clearly a doctor. They’re young and old, black and white, and beardy, hairy or bald. The doctors have lots of character sprites. But then I noticed the doctors: all the doctors in Theme Hospital are men. The only voiceovers in the game are women too. This a game from 1997 maybe there just wasn’t enough disk space to be able to create alternate receptionist character sprites. Now you might be thinking what I thought. It is not possible to hire a receptionist that is a man. The gender stereotyping starts at step 2 of that process, where the only receptionists you can hire are women. The tutorial for Theme Hospital is brief, and there are only 4 steps to it: I recently started playing it again, prompted by news that the original game’s developers were reviving the classic.Īs I sat building rooms, curing cases of “Bloaty Head”, and hiring staff, I noticed something: Theme Hospital isn’t just a hospital management simulator. After two decades, the game still has a special place in the hearts of many. Continued abuse of our services will cause your IP address to be blocked indefinitely.Twenty year’s ago this month, Theme Hospital was released in Europe on the PlayStation 1. Please fill out the CAPTCHA below and then click the button to indicate that you agree to these terms. If you wish to be unblocked, you must agree that you will take immediate steps to rectify this issue. If you do not understand what is causing this behavior, please contact us here. If you promise to stop (by clicking the Agree button below), we'll unblock your connection for now, but we will immediately re-block it if we detect additional bad behavior. Overusing our search engine with a very large number of searches in a very short amount of time.Using a badly configured (or badly written) browser add-on for blocking content.Running a "scraper" or "downloader" program that either does not identify itself or uses fake headers to elude detection.Using a script or add-on that scans GameFAQs for box and screen images (such as an emulator front-end), while overloading our search engine.There is no official GameFAQs app, and we do not support nor have any contact with the makers of these unofficial apps. Continued use of these apps may cause your IP to be blocked indefinitely. This triggers our anti-spambot measures, which are designed to stop automated systems from flooding the site with traffic. Some unofficial phone apps appear to be using GameFAQs as a back-end, but they do not behave like a real web browser does.
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