The National Women’s Law Center wanted to breathe new life into a stale topic: gender wage gap. Over the last twenty years, the gap has only shrunk by one cent. Yet, young women remain apathetic and misinformed about the issue.

To engage a younger audience, we needed them to see the issue in a brand new light. So, in October 2014, Droga5 launched the Equal Payback Project – a campaign to crowdfund the wage gap and rally millennial women to take charge of their financial fates.

The campaign launched with an absurd video featuring Sarah Silverman getting gender reassignment surgery to avoid the wage gap.

The video directed people to EqualPaybackProject.com, a crowdfunding website built on the Tilt platform that had the ambitious goal of raising $29,811,746,430,000 – the largest online fundraising campaign in history. Why $30 trillion? Well, the average woman earns 78 cents to every man’s dollar. Over the course of her career, that’s $439,049. Multiply those losses by the 69 million women working year-round for 40 years and the total comes to almost $30 trillion in lost wages. EqualPaybackProject.com gave the community financial milestones to work towards and featured fun infographics that helped demystify the wage gap.

As of right now, American working women still earn just $0.78 cents to a man’s dollar. In an average year, a woman loses $10,876 as a result of the wage gap. Over the course of her career, that’s $435,049. And this extends across all disciplines, from nurses to teachers to CEOs. While there are laws in place to protect against discrimation related to equal pay, there are no laws to correct for the more systemic causes of the wage gap. In reality, discrimation only accounts for approximately 4% of the gap, which means 96% of it is systemic.

The Equal Payback Project's objectives were to raise awareness about the wage gap, explain its causes and get young women to care.

With a minimal budget and zero paid media, the campaign gained over 700 million media impressions through organic earned coverage by over 150 media outlets. These include MSNBC, Good Morning America, Huffington Post, Refinery29, USA Today, Cosmo US and UK, Glamour, US Weekly, Vanity Fair, E! News, New York Times, MTV, The Guardian, Jezebe, the Daily Mail and more. The campaign also raised close to $100,00 for the Naitonal Women's Law Center, the leading non-profit fighting for equal pay in America. The campaign propelled the NWLC onto the international stage, receiving news coverage in countries like Autralia, New Zealand and the UK.

In addition to mainstream media coverage, the project went viral on social media, trending on Facebook and gaining 111M social impressions, achieving the primary goal of the campaign.

Equal pay is a dry, complex, stigmatized issue in America. Many factors contribute to the wage gap, most of which are deeply rooted systemic problems that are hard to explain (residual implications of historic gender roles, caretaking expectations, etc). Which is why, a lot of the time, we hear politicians and naysayers attempting to debunk the wage gap with superficial arguments. Yet, young American women don’t know enough about the nuances of the gap to be able to fight for equal pay, or even realize it might be affecting them. This misinformation leads to apathy and apathy creates stagnation.

With the Equal Payback Project, we created a campaign that made equal pay an accessible issue for young American women. Using humor and light-heartedness, we avoided the tropes of the average public service announcement (sad, depressing, victimized) and shed a simple, absurdist light on a complicated gender issue. This approach allowed us to engage a new audience in an old issue and adopt equal pay as their own fight.

The National Women’s Law Center’s mission is to “expand, protect, and promote opportunity and advancement for women and girls at every stage of their lives.” But when women are apathetic towards their own advancement, in becomes difficult to deliver on this mission. Such is the case with equal pay, an issue that has made virtually no progress in two decades.

Initial research showed that young American women feel untouched and misinformed about the wage gap. They don’t see it happening to them in the first few years of their careers, therefore it doesn’t exist. The dryness and complexity of the issue doesn’t help. To engage young professional women, we needed to both demystify the wage gap AND make it sexy again.

Our strategy was to lean into the absurdity of paying women less in 2015. We demonstrated this by launching an unrealistic crowdfunding campaign to raise the collective $30 billion women lose over the course of their careers. Compared to the statistic normally used to contextualize equal pay (women make $0.78 to every man’s dollar), this new framing felt glaring, undeniable and ridiculous. To drive people to the crowdfunding site, we created an equally preposterous video in which Sarah Silverman takes drastic measures to avoid the wage gap. In consortium, the video and fundraising site not only made the campaign fun and accessible to a younger generation, but it gave equal pay an urgency among a group that typically regards it as their mothers’ fight.

The NWLC is an action-oriented organization and ultimately, the Equal Payback Project got young women riled up and ready to fight for equal pay.