Sarah Silverman has a simple solution for closing the gender pay gap: undergo gender reassignment surgery.
She's joking, of course, but when it comes to the pay gap, she's deadly serious.
In a video posted to her YouTube account on Wednesday, Silverman makes a pitch to donate to the Equal Payback Project, which aims to raise all the money women are not making compared to male workers.
"Every year, the average woman loses around $11,000 to the wage gap. Over the course of the working years of her life, that's almost $500,000. That's a $500,000 vagina tax!" she says in the video.
The project aims to raise a total of $29,811,746,430,000.
Its website shows not only how much money has been raised, but precisely how many women its donations would pay back over a specific time period. With 23 days to go on Wednesday, the project had raised $75,528, which would be enough to pay back one woman's working losses over a period of almost seven years.
But a gender pay gap isn't just an issue in America. Canada has its own problems when it comes to paying women and men equally.
Economics professor Kevin Milligan posted the following tweet on Tuesday, using numbers from Statistics Canada:
The picture is no less unfair when you look at a Parliamentary labour report from 2010.
It showed that women's average full-year earnings in 2008 were $44,700, while men's were $62,600. The pay gap had only closed by just over $2,000 since 2008.
The report went on to show that women are closer to men when it comes to hourly wages, with the gap especially narrow in temporary positions. When accounting for both union and non-union employees, women made $19.75 per hour, compared to $21.01 per hour for men.
A pay raise index published by Waterloo, Ont. based company Tribe HR in 2012 showed that, while women were receiving more pay raises than men, males were still three times more likely than females to receive pay raises of 25 per cent or more.
The OECD said around the same time that narrowing the gender gap could lead to economic growth.
"Investment in gender equality yields the highest returns of all development investments," the organization noted.
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