The Gender Wage Gap

“Women earn 79 cents for every dollar a man makes.”  Factually correct, but that doesn’t reflect the complexity of the problem. Sarah Kliff explains:

Patricia Arquette Minds the Gap

When Patricia Arquette accepted the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress, she had words of support for other working women (especially working moms): “It’s our time to have wage equality once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America.”

While not everyone gave her performance (or her backstage chatter) rave reviews, Jesus smiled on it (okay, it’s Jared Leto). And so did  Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez:

Mind the Gap

“According to calculations from the Equal Payback Project, American women are owed $29,811,746,430,000 (that’s U.S. dollars, also known as U.S. golden dollars with Sacagawea on them) due to the wage gap.

Working female Sarah Silverman is fund-raising for this exact amount. She promises that if this fund-raising goal is met, each woman in America will receive a check. If not, the money will go the National Women’s Law Center, which advocates for legal and structural changes to support professional women. They’re only trillions dollars away from removing this gap off the list of gaps facing women today.”

— “Sarah Silverman Is Fund-raising 29 Trillion Dollars,” Maggie Lange, New York Magazine

More:

“Sarah Silverman creates provocative new video on women’s salaries and ‘the $500,000 vagina tax,'” Siri Srinivas, The Guardian

“Everything you need to know about the gender wage gap,” Danielle Kurtzleben, Vox

“Pay Equity & Discrimination,” Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

 Video after the jump (NSFW, of course, it’s Sarah Silverman.)