Let’s Hack the Pay Gap Together

Thanks to everyone who joined our nationwide effort of developers, designers, and data scientists building tools and products to close the gender pay gap.

Check out the pay gap products that were built here.

Connect

Join our community of practitioners working to close the gender pay gap.

Join the community

Data is one of the most powerful tools we have to accelerate change. Leveraging newly-released income and gender data from the U.S. Census, how might we work together to decrease the gender pay gap and increase the economic empowerment of women?

Connect with us on our Slack Channel and on Github.

Join Us in Slack Join Us on GitHub

Build

Challenges

Not sure where to start? Here are few challenges to get you going:

Tools for Workers

How might we build tools to increase salary transparency in the workplace to help women better negotiate salaries and benefits?
How might we build tools to help women better negotiate their pay?
How might we build tools to help workers in an industry or at an organization collaborate to increase pay transparency in their sector or their workplace?

Tools for Companies

How might we build tools to help companies evaluate the prevalence of gender segregation in their workforce?
How might we provide tools for companies to conduct a blind application screening process?
How might we build tools that reduce the structural need for worker negoatiation?

Tools for the Public

How might we demonstrate the root causes and consequences of the gender pay gap to the broader public?
How might we demonstrate the true value of unpaid care work?
How might we bring transparency to the companies doing the most to eliminate the pay gap?
How might we demonstrate the paygap across issues, geographies, education level, and race?

Data Inventory

Use curated data related to salary and wages for women and men from across federal and local governments.

Download this inventory as a flattened CSV file.

Federal

Main data site: https://data.gov Edit in GitHub

Curator	Description
BLS	OES 2015 - MSA
	OES 2015 - National
	OES 2015 - State
Census	2005 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2005-2009 5 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2006 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2007 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2008 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2009 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2009-2014 5 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2010 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2011 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2012 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2013 1 Year ACS PUMS Data
	2014 1 Year ACS PUMS Data

User Scenarios

These scenarios describe composite examples of women in the workforce being paid less than men for the same type of work. Use the scenarios in your design process to ensure that what you build responds to real needs.

Manager of a service center recently promoted.

Diane works as a manager of a service center for a major mortgage lender in the suburbs of Atlanta. Diane is a mother of two high school kids and has a husband who also works full time. She’s been an employee of the company for 12 years and two years ago completed an online MBA program that she felt would help her career. Diane generally puts in 45 hours per week and sometimes attends to issues on weekends. She has recently been promoted to senior manager, replacing a man in that position. The new position included a raise in salary to $76,242. The raise is at the bottom end of what she heard informally the position could pay, but is unsure how to actually find out and feels she’d rather focus on her new position than cause waves over finding out what her predecessor made. In fact, the male senior manager was paid $94,650 when he started the same position with roughly the same experience as she has.

Shipping clerk in a warehouse.

Mina is 37 and works as a shipping clerk for wholesale fabricator of cribs in North Carolina. She manages invoices, customer orders, customer service, etc. She is the only person doing her job in the warehouse. The other positions in the company are mostly related to warehouse operations such as forklift driver, equipment maintenance manager and packers. She has two young kids, is not married and her mother also lives with her. The other non-managerial positions in the warehouse pay an average of 25% more than she gets paid.

Sales associate at big box electronics retailer.

Victoria works as a sales associate in the personal computer department of a big box electronics retailer in Phoenix, AZ. She is a senior in a local community college studying to be a radiology technician. She has been with the retailer for two years and is known as a person to go to for help on customer issues and is good with customers. Victoria is paid $13.50 / hour to do the same work that male colleagues do but get paid an average of $14.75 for the same experience. Victoria has heard that her co-workers make more than her and she has brought it up in her most recent review. Her supervisor, a man, said that he cannot comment on other’s wages, she’s doing good work and that she will be up for a raise in another six months.

Ultimately, though, equal pay isn’t just an economic issue for millions of Americans and their families, it’s a question of who we are – and whether we’re truly living up to our fundamental ideals."

—President Barack Obama