Presidential Innovation Fellows launch #HackThePayGap

If you’ve spent any time on the internet today you know that it’s #EqualPayDay, that day of the year when the average American woman’s earnings finally catch up with the average American man’s earning from the year before.
Equal Pay Day is a yearly acknowledgement of the persistent gender pay gap, a gap that means women make an average of 79 cents for every dollar a man makes. Women of color make even less.
This makes it the perfect day for the Presidential Innovation Fellows, with help from the Department of Commerce and the White House’s Council on Women and Girls, to launch #HackThePayGap —  ”a nationwide effort which challenges developers, designers and data scientists to build tools and products that help close the gender pay gap.”

Calling all data, tech, & designers! We need you to #HackThePayGaphttps://t.co/FVIdl4aJ9s

— DJ Patil (NARA) (@DJ44) April 12, 2016

In a Medium post announcing the launch, four Presidential Innovation Fellows challenge developers across the country to use MIDAAS (Making Income Data Available As A Service), an API, website and developer toolkit created by the U.S. Census, “to develop innovative, open source tools and visualizations to increase transparency and inspire meaningful action around this issue.”
Not quite sure what this means? Here are some example challenges from the website that might serve to get you thinking:

• How might we use data to increase salary transparency and help women better negotiate?
• How might we use data to enable companies to pay their employees more equitably?

The Fellows will be working with teams over the next month, the post goes on to say, and a “handful” of solutions will be shared with the public at The United State of Women summit in May. The #HackThePayGap website mentions a May 15 hackathon as well.
Want to get involved?
You can join the #HackThePayGap community on Slack and GitHub.