Justice

This Feminist Super Bowl Ad Will Have Everyone Talking Sunday

February 2nd 2017

A car commercial set to run during the Super Bowl is getting a lot of buzz for tackling the gender pay gap issue.

Audi premiered the commercial on their YouTube page on February 1, and will reveal it to a nationwide audience on Super Bowl Sunday, The Huffington Post reports.

As a father watches his daughter compete in a "downhill cart race in her hometown," he thinks out loud what he'll tell her about her future as a woman in the workforce.

"What do I tell my daughter?"

"Do I tell her that her grandpa's worth more than her grandma?" he asks in a voice over. "That her dad is worth more than her mom? Do I tell her that despite her drive ... her skills ... her intelligence, she will automatically be valued less than any man she meets?"

Spoiler alert: His daughter wins the race, suggesting that perhaps this is only one of many big wins for women in the future.

Women, overall, still earn less than men.

Full time working women in the United States still earn about 78 cents for every dollar a man earns. This wage is generally even lower for women of color, as 2014 U.S. Census data shows.

This disparity in pay between men and women, as well between white women and women of color, are consistent across the United States, according to this interactive map created by the National Women's Law Center, based on census data.

This pay gap isn't limited among lower or median incomes; in January, Natalie Portman revealed in an interview with Marie Claire that she too was stuck in the gap. In 2011, the same year she won an Oscar, she was also paid significantly less than her male co-star.

There are some who still maintain that the wage gap is either not real or is imagined, arguing that perhaps it really comes down to the result of women making bad or different career choices, like choosing jobs that pay less generally, or choosing to be stay-at-home mothers instead.

"But the argument that 'life choices' made by women are the real reason behind the gap is, in itself, an absurd oversimplification," Catherine Pearson, a senior reporter at The Huffington Post explains. "Sure, many women choose to stay home or cut back their hours after having children. But many others don’t opt out. They’re forced out because they cannot afford child care, or find a full-time job that affords them any kind of flexibility. And, culturally, Americans remain ambivalent about women working outside of the home. A little more than 30 percent of Americans still believe women should stay home full-time to care for young children."

Obviously, the primary function of any commercial is to sell a product, but that Audi would tackle an issue like the gender wage gap may have you actually wondering what the future will look like for today's girls and tomorrow's women.

[H/T Huffington Post]

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