Apparently there’s an easier way to close the gender pay gap than trying to extract equal pay from your employers.
According to US comedian and “vagina owner”, Sarah Silverman, the solution to the roughly $435,000 a US woman can expect to lose in wages across her lifetime is simple: Close your own “gap” and you’ll finally earn equal pay.
In a newly released video campaign, Silverman appears in a doctor’s surgery, explaining that she’s waiting to become a “dude”. She’s also got the facts:
“Every year the average woman loses around $11,000 to the wage gap. Over the course of the working years of her life, that’s almost 500 grand. That’s a $500,000 vagina tax.”
The video, which comes with a Not Safe For Work disclaimer, is part of a campaign by the National Women’s Law Centre to crowdfund $30 trillion to pay back all the woman in the US the pay they’ve missed out on. Yep, that’s right. The 69 million working women in the US are losing out on a combined $29,811,746,430,000.
While the $30 trillion figure is an admittedly improbable sum to raise, the money that is raised through the campaign will actually go towards helping the not-for-profit fight employment discrimination and focus on pushing through legislative issues that promote pay quality.
“They fight to help women get the money they deserve,” Silverman says. “They’re very good at what they do, you know, for a bunch of girls.”