#talkpay

Tuesday, April 10

Today is the day a woman must work to in order to earn as much as her male counterparts did in 2007. Yep, more than 15 months working to get the same money men get in 12 for the same work.

Http://www.equalpaytoday.org

See, I wanna be a self-sustaining and revolutionary business capable of paying queer media-makers what they deserve and putting resources into projects made by us, for us. But the money flooding awesome new media properties like Refinery29 means that our inability to pay competitively could lead us to suffer the same death of so many independent queer publications that came before us. There’s been a huge push for more LGBTQ content at mainstream publications over the past year, and queer writers will find it easier to pay their bills writing for Cosmo or Nylon than they could writing for indies like us. We’re still here though, because this is our dream and these are our hearts, and we do believe in a financially prosperous future. We just hope that we get enough A+ members by the end of the year to keep the dream alive! 

On May 1st, the international day of workers, Lauren Voswinkel a senior software developer who lives in Pittsburgh, is urging people to share their job title and salary on Twitter using the hashtag #talkpay. Breaking down the social taboo around people’s pay could help bridge the gender pay gap as well as give workers realistic expectations about salaries in their field. Cool initiative.

.CLICK IT http://www.refinery29.com/2015/05/86706/talkpay-salaries-on-twitter

As a cis white male I have significant privilege in this area. As a gay man I’ve also had problems. Mostly homophobia in the workplace, but I was once fired from a job when my boss found out I was gay. (It was a shit job and I ain’t even mad. But it did happen.) I’m also fat, which can be a problem but hasn’t been for me beyond microaggressions. My white male status significantly mitigates the fat bias.

My privilege takes the obvious forms of race and gender, and also the simple luck that things that I like to do and are really good at are immediately marketable in our society. That too is a form of privilege: it is enforced by society and allows me to simply skip past a lot of problems.

And the thing is it’s not like I haven’t worked my ass off to get where I am. But I was able to skip barriers that I would have had to deal with if I were a woman, or a POC, or basically anything except a cis white male.

New Post: Talking Pay - From 25k - 78k in a decade #talkpay

Seeing that #talkpay is trending on Twitter it’s time to write the post I’ve waited on and thought long and hard about for a long time.

I awoke to tweets from my brother using #talkpay. And added my voice to the chorus of people talking about their pay. Before I go any further, plenty of people don’t feel comfortable sharing their pay publicly on Twitter. I am one of those people. I’ve shared…