Help Solve The Gender Pay Gap… With A Smartphone App?
2:30 pm, February 4th | by Amy Tennery
Equal pay for women? We need an app for that.
Calling all women-friendly developers: Nows your chance to create a smartphone app to educate people about the gender pay gap. And the federal government is going to make it worth your while.
The National Equal Pay Task Force (a part of challenge.gov) has launched its Equal Pay App Challenge. If you want to win, you need to create an app that helps women negotiate salaries, access early career tips and connect to online mentoring programs. Sure. No sweat. From the contest entry page:
Nearly 50 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, on average women are still paid less than their male counterparts for doing comparable jobs – that’s called the pay gap. It means that each time the average woman starts a new job, she’s likely to start from a lower base salary, but it also means that over time the pay gap between her and her male colleagues is likely to become wider and wider.
For the average working woman, the pay gap means $150 less in her weekly paycheck, $8,000 less at the end of the year, and $380,000 less over her lifetime. For women of color and women with disabilities, the disparity is even bigger.
Your challenge is to use publicly available labor data and other online resources to educate users about the pay gap and to build tools to promote equal pay.
And what will you get for your troubles? Five grand prize winers get an eight-week entrepreneurship training program, free of cost, from General Assembly — and the winning app maker gets $5,000 from Catalyst.org, to purchase his or her invention.
Sure, it’s not going to solve the pay problem overnight. But still… five grand? Well worth your time. Contest ends March 31, so get cracking!
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