Fast Cars, Equal Pay: Audi Drives Controversy on Gender Parity Ad

taketheleadwomen.com - The hotly contested Audi television commercial premiering at The Super Bowl features a father mulling over how to tell his young daughter the financial facts of life. He asks if she knows that “despite her education, her drive, her skills, her intelligence, she will automatically be valued less than any man she ever meets?”

He then decides, “Or maybe I’ll be able to tell her something different,” and they head over to an Audi to drive off into the sunset of gender parity.

The spot is the work of Aoife McArdle, a female director, another anomaly in the advertising world, where fewer than 10 percent of the top commercial directors are female.

“The commercial closes with father and daughter embracing after the race and walking up to their shiny Audi S5 Sportback, because after all, it’s a car commercial. That doesn’t make the message about equality and progress any less moving and important, though. Additionally, Audi said it has pledged to ‘support ongoing commitment to women’s pay equality in the workplace and to foster a work environment that drives equality for all employees,’ according to a press release,” writes Tony Mervick in Thrillist.

Why Gender Inequality Is More Acute for Women in the South

Not all inequality is created equal. Though a disparity between the sexes is seen throughout the United States and around the world, women in the South have it especially rough. A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research lays out the facts, and they're pretty bleak for Southern states. Adverse workplace environment, lack of representation in state legislatures, even greater than average wage inequality and more left Southern states in the bottom of the rankings when it came to six categories women's welfare.Click through to read more about the report's findings, which are especially important in this election year.

theatlantic.com - The gender pay gap is a worldwide problem, but women in some places have it worse than others. A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) reveals that working women in the South suffer some of the harshest inequalities in the U.S., not only in terms of how much they are paid, but how they are treated in the workforce.

To compare the status of women across the nation, the report grades each state based on six categories: political participation, employment and earnings, work and family, poverty and opportunity, reproductive rights, and health and well-being. Not a single Southern state was given an overall grade higher than a C-. In fact, 10 out of the 14 Southern states received some form of a D grade, as shown in the chart below.

Best and Worst States in the South

While not all of the report’s findings are this bleak, many of them reveal startling realities about just how divisive the workplace is for women in the South. When it comes to political participation, for instance, only one Southern state—North Carolina—earned above a D grade. Meanwhile, the report concludes that it will take more than 200 years for West Virginia and South Carolina to achieve gender parity in their state legislatures—almost double the time it will take to close the global pay gap.

Read more here.