The gender pay gap gets a pandemic boost

This Tuesday it was equal pay day and it was sad to see that the gap in Australia between what men and women earn had widened from last year.

On Equal pay day it marked 61 extra days from the end of the financial year - the additional days women would need to work in order to have pay parity with men. Last year this was slightly smaller at 59 days.

Each year a Gender Global Pay Gap report is released and this April it stated that on the current trajectory it would take 135.6 years to close the pay gap - but again this was up a huge 36 years on what that gap had been reported at pre-pandemic (when it sat at 99.5 years to close the gap).

A large reason for this is the unpaid care that has fallen disproportionately to women as children are at home. Industries most impacted have also been largely female dominated such as service industries like hospitality and tourism.

Knowing that most important to solving this are some significant cultural barriers we need to overcome... to increase the positivity of this post lets instead switch focus to look at a few great financial literacy initiatives that can hope to teach all people, particularly those of the next generation, the tips and tricks to manage their money (especially in light of our lockdown-enabling online spending boom).

FINTROPOLIS

Blockworks, a world-leading Minecraft design collective, and Ally Financial have launched a massive new Minecraft dubbed Fintropolis. Made from more than 20,416,204 blocks, Fintropolis is a new free world within the Minecraft marketplace also offering EDU versions as a resource for parents and educators to teach middle-school-aged kids money concepts. Fintropolis is one of only 22 free, educational worlds on the Minecraft Marketplace, which boasts 1,000+ paid worlds.

FINCOCKTAIL

Just one of many great accounts enabling women to financially empower other women through improving their financial literacy. From picking stocks to choosing credit cards to tips on taxes the account has 134k followers so clearly they are providing the information that women (and men!) are keen to hear.

FOREKASH

Forekash is a novel personal finance app that is looking to differential itself by offering a range of functions and services that focus on upcoming and future transactions, rather than tracking and compiling past transactions.

The app, which is available on the Apple App Store as well as Google Play, makes use of AI and machine learning algorithms to learn your spending habits, before predicting what financial implications these habits may hold for the future. By using mathematical data to assess future cash flow, the Forekash app aims to help users manage their finances by mitigating unpleasant surprises

Zara Cooper