Equal Pay Day is here to stay

The Out of Office campaign created by advertising agency Now and The Women’s Equality Party is back today (9 November) for Equal Pay Day. After an impactful debut last year which resulted in an winning a Cannes Lion advertising award, the campaign’s second year launches a new bid to raise awareness around the gender pay gap.

In the UK the gender pay gap has dropped slightly with women earning on average 17.9% less than the average man, the full- time pay gap currently stands at 8.6%. 
The records are measured over a full calendar year, meaning Equal Pay Day is the day where “women effectively stop being paid a salary relative to men.”

The objective of the campaign entails that if women are effectively not being paid to work from this date, then why should they work? The design of the Out of Office campaign uses an everyday office template to emphasise this inequality. This year’s campaign also features support from popular media channels such as Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and a number of other websites which will appear to have technical faults today “loading messages saying they’re also ‘not working’ as a way of highlighting the absurdity of the gender pay gap.”

If you’d like to take part, the campaign encourages Twitter uses to “switch on their Twitter out of office” in support of eradicating the gender pay gap.