Women do just as much – if not more – in the workplace, but still make less than men on average. Overall, women make .80 cents for every dollar a white man makes, while Latina and black women, respectively, make .54 and .63 cents (in the US). The Muse, a career building website, looking into ways to fight this situation stumbled upon an insight from a study by the Cass Business School in London, the University of Warwick in the U.K., and the University of Wisconsin which revealed that women are 25% less likely to receive a raise after asking. They then approached us with the task of helping women better prepare for this key moment in their careers: asking for a raise.
We 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. Launched on April 4th, International Equal Pay day, the Cindy Gallop Chatbot 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 develop a skill, you need more than advice, you need a tool. To build it, we gathered information from a global salary profile database, research data from various sources, and real human insights from a professional community for women and from conversations, articles and TED talks Cindy has given. More than that, building a case and facing fears in an individual challenge. Therefore, we needed an accessible platform (with a global reach) to be able to deliver the 1:1 conversation that can help guide women in their personal path to develop their skills. Facebook Messenger was the perfect platform to get the reach as well as the privacy we wanted. Besides female professionals all over the world, the Cindy Gallop Chatbot is also intended to draw awareness to the pay gap issue, and so can be used by anyone. However, only women have full access to the Chatbot's information.
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".
