Most people who follow my work will know how strongly I feel around wanting to get paid for my time. I feel strongly about other people - particularly women - being paid for their time. I feel very strongly about this given that we are officially at the part of the year where the disparity in the gender pay gap means that from now on until the end of December, women are effectively working for free. In fact, if you are in the UK, here’s a shit-flavoured cherry for your banana shit sundae, the gender pay gap has actually increased from 10.7% to 11.3% according to the Fawcett Society.
And I feel especially very strongly about women of colour being paid because even on the Oliver Twist side of the gender pay gap there is a spectrum of who gets paid more and who gets paid less. You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to guess who, just a rudimentary understanding of structural racism and perhaps this link that will tell you that Black women get paid 11% less than white women. But, I digress!
The other day I received an email that irritated me so much, I’m still angry about it seven days later. In it, the person asked me to take part in a project of theirs and said that they would try and pay me ‘as I know that is very important to you.’ To caveat, this isn’t a friend or a family member, and I was being asked to provide my time and knowledge.
The reason why I’m angry enough to write a Substack about it is because this kind of language is part of the insidious vocabulary that guilts you or makes you feel like a money-grubber because you have the temerity to want to be paid for your time. Could you imagine in any other scenario - say, a full-time job - where your manager offers to pay you because they know it’s ‘very important to you’?
It is hard enough trying to get paid fairly - for women, the concept doesn’t yet exist, and what doesn’t help are the people who either try and haggle your services as if it’s a car boot sale, or make you feel unreasonable or diva-ish for wanting to get paid at all. And before we get into it - this kind of shaming is undertaken by no specific gender - I’ve received this in equal amounts from women as I have from men.
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