The Muse turned one of the world’s fiercest female leaders and equal pay advocate into an innovative tool that helps women develop their salary bargaining skills. Why? Because amongst the reasons why women are 25% less likely to receive a raise are the facts that women often don’t know how to ask, when to ask, and how much to ask. Along with partners Ladies Get Paid, Reply.AI, and PayScale, we launched on April 4th, International Equal Pay day, the Cindy Gallop Chatbot, which creates a private conversation on Facebook Messenger between two women backed by data and supported with sass, getting us one step closer to closing the gender pay gap by building the confidence and the case ladies need to successfully ask for a raise, while drawing awareness and inspiring action.

To build the Cindy Gallop Facebook Messenger Chatbot, we compiled salary information from PayScale (a global salary profile database), research data from various sources, and real human insights from Ladies Get Paid and Cindy Gallop herself. All this data made possible for ladies to compare their salary with other professionals in their own city, learn when is the best day to ask (Friday, morning), and even answer confidence concerns with cold hard data (75% of people who ask get some kind of pay bump). The pay gap is a global problem, and solving it requires a 1:1 conversation. Because of that, the bot, launched on April 4th (International Equal Pay day), runs on Facebook Messenger, and thanks to Cindy’s unique tone of voice, has become a light-hearted but insightful tool to scale powerful individual conversations, helping female professional around the world build their case 24 hours/day, 7 days/week.

With ZERO dollars of media budget, the Cindy Gallop Chatbot garnered over 110 million media impressions worth over $1 million in earned media, in the first seven days. Mashable said the Cindy Gallop Chatbot is a girl’s “new foul-mothed best friend” and Fortune loved the tips: “Best piece of advice: ‘… ask yourself what would a straight white guy do? Do that.’” Brand partners saw 5x the normal daily reach on social media and traffic to their site. But above all, the tool has seen over 100,000 users, 86% of them female (ages 18-44), with conversations lasting an average of 1 minute and 43 seconds. And from the myriad of tweets and posts from women referencing the Chatbot on social media, one made all of this worthwhile: Twitter user @CMwritesalot (Claire Mason) tweeted “… it got me to ask for my worth & the client paid! #winning”.