They’re cakes, just cakes. But they’re being baked and sold in an effort to represent much more: the gender pay gap.
A planned cake stall for the University of Queensland’s ‘Feminist Week’ has caused a bit of a stir on social media, after revealing a pricing strategy based on gender. Men would pay $1 for the cupcakes, everyone else would pay, “the proportion of $1 that you earn comparative to men”, according to their faculty. So a woman of colour in the legal profession, for example, would pay 55 cents.
The description on the Feminist Week website is short, and looks pretty harmless sitting amongst a list of other activities organised by the UQU Women’s Collective running from April 4 to April 8, including workshops and seminars all focused on women and gender issues.
The cake stall was advertised as an opportunity to highlight the gender pay gap, which sees women working full-time earning an average 17.3% less than men, as of March 2016
But it quickly became an opportunity for complaints (and then later attacks), with many on Facebook and Twitter expressing their “disappointment” that the university would allow such a discriminatory practice to occur, especially given Queensland’s Anti Discrimination Act as well as the National Sex Discrimination Act.
UQ’s Facebook page ‘StalkerSpace’ received much of the activity, with a post by student Ashley Millsteed that appears to have since been removed.
The cake stall is discriminatory, that’s the point.
These are the pay gaps women contend with every day. They’re pay gaps that are not worth mere cents, but rather tens of thousands of dollars — if not even more. The Workplace Gender Equality Agency recently revealed that in key leadership positions men can be paid a massive $100,000 more than women. That’s a whole lot of cakes.
Every day women spend a greater proportion of their pay on goods and services than men. And yes, many of us do complain about it because those gender pay gaps add up to a lifetime of inequality. This pay gap results in women retiring with significantly less in superannuation and ultimately contributes to the fact that 40% of single women will experience poverty later on in life.
The UQ Student Union’s VP of gender and sexuality Madeline Price told the ABC the stall was set up to “start a conversation” about the pay gap but instead resulted in the organisers being attacked. She said they’ve since had rape and death threats “by people who were threatened by the existence of a bake sale that could potentially engage with an issue of inequality”.
This is the world we still live in in 2016, where women who dare to highlight a gender-based issue – even via something as fun and quirky as a cake stall – are consequently attacked online.
Let them eat cake and just for a moment, at one little stall, let everyone experience how the gender pay gap actually works.