STEP 1
I recently attended an online conference on equal opportunities. Particularly, a speaker focused on the fact that women’s average salary is lower than that of their male colleagues for the same jobs. I didn’t know this social phenomenon, and I felt very bad hearing all those statistics. I realized I felt like the issue didn’t quite pick the issue. The issue had chosen me.
STEP 2
I decided to look for like-minded people, so I wrote a post on a portal I use almost every day (Reddit) to ask people to join my cause. Many users commented on my posts, and six of them decided to start acting together with me.
STEP 3
We decided to start from what we already knew about the topic and did much online research of articles and news about it. As most of us live in a different country, each focused on getting information about the local situation in order to have a more global vision of the problem.
STEP 4
Our goal was to:
S Raise awareness about the gender inequality of salaries through the use of web platforms.
M Have 100 people participating in our activity.
A Make at least 50 participants make a post to raise awareness about the issue.
R Pay gap is a reality in many countries.
T Within 60 days.
STEP 5
We studied international reports and documents from authoritative sources. We prepared a form to collect other direct experiences. We designed an information campaign on the topic and developed three call-to-actions to be launched online every fortnight.
STEP 6
We sent the form via email and instant messaging services, and we created a blog to tell our action and all the information collected. We gathered the answers received and published them by creating infographics. We launched the three call-to-actions – one aimed at spreading the form and collect more answers, another at having more people visit our blog, the last one at asking people to write personal messages to support the cause by using the hashtag #nopaygap. In the end, we put everything in a report and sent this document to the Enterprise Europe Network, the EU Parliament, and the EU Commission asking them to make an effort.
STEP 7
After the 60 days, we organized an online meeting with all the group members. We shared opinions about the experience, useful tips on how we could improve, and looked online for the results of our actions. The analytics from our blog announced that every call-to-action had drawn more and more visitors, that we had collected more answers from the form than we expected, and also the sharing on social networks was stronger than the goal we had set. We even received an unexpected reply from a European officer who thanked us for what we had done and informed us of Europe’s actions to combat this kind of inequality.
STEP 8
We felt so proud! Finally, we arranged an online toast and watched a movie together on an online shared platform.
