Hacking the Pay Gap on Equal Pay Day

By Ben Willman, Smita Satiani, Josh Patterson and Kyla Fullenwider, Presidential Innovation Fellows

Twenty years ago, Equal Pay Day was first announced as part of an effort to call attention the gender pay gap. Over the last two decades a lot of work has been done to address the disparity including the passage of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restores protection against pay discrimination. Companies like Buffer are creating new standards around pay transparency by publishing salary data and formulas. And this month, the State of New York passed a new budget that provides three months of paid parental leave beginning in 2018, an issue that has long been associated with the ‘motherhood penalty’ and lowered future earnings for mothers.

These are all critical steps in closing the wage gap and yet, frustratingly, many of the issues that drove the passage of the first Equal Pay Day still persist.

The number we often hear is that women are paid 79 cents for every dollar a man is paid. And for women of color it’s even worse: 60 cents and 55 cents for African American and Latina women, respectively.

Women continue to be overrepresented in the lowest wage professions and the ‘motherhood penalty’ is a very real thing, particularly for single mothers who make $22,885 less annually than fathers who work full time, or just 58 cents for every dollar. Over the course of a lifetime, this means less grocery money, rent money, and savings.

“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

These kinds of big, messy, intractable problems persist because they are ‘silver bullet resistant’. That is, they resist singular solutions and instead require multi-faceted shifts in policy, culture, and technology to really move the needle. Complicated problems like these can take years or even decades to resolve and are especially in need of the kind of clarity that data can bring to things like salary transparency and leadership distribution. That’s just the start, of course, but a critical and essential first step.

In this spirit, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, in partnership with the Department of Commerce and the White House’s Council on Women and Girls are announcing #Hackthepaygap — a nationwide effort which challenges developers, designers and data scientists to build tools and products that help close the gender pay gap.

Using MIDAAS (Making Income Data Available As A Service), a recently-released API, website and developer toolkit from the U.S. Census that gives the public the ability to explore income data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and accelerates developers’ ability to integrate government data in their projects, we are calling on individuals or teams to develop innovative, open source tools and visualizations to increase transparency and inspire meaningful action around this issue.

Over the next month, we will work with teams across the country in the lead up to the White House’s United State of Women Summit this May, where a handful of outcomes will be shared and announced to the broader public. You can find data sets at paygap.pif.gov and join our community of practitioners through our public Slack channel.

Interested in getting women paid what they deserve? Join us!