Presidential Innovation Fellows want public to hack the pay gap
A group of tech-minded govies is asking the public to build tools and products on top of government data — and help to close the gender pay gap.
The Presidential Innovation Fellows, the Commerce Department and the White House’s Council on Women and Girls launched an effort Tuesday called Hack the Pay Gap. They’re calling on Americans to use a recently released open data tool to create new ways to explore answers to gender inequality.
The effort is built around data from the Census Bureau’s MIDAAS project — an API, website and developer toolkit that gives the public the ability to explore income data.
The project wants developers to tackle the following questions when building around government data:
- 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?
- How might we use data to visualize the consequences of the gender pay gap to the broader public?
The team also listed a number of user case scenarios it would like developers to employ as they build their products.
The call for projects will lead up to the White House’s United State of Women Summit on May 15.
You can find more on the project’s website, GitHub page, or public Slack channel.
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