Viral video shows media diversity startup delivering IWD cupcakes with a gender pay gap twist

Exactly two weeks ago, the Workplace Gender Equality Agency published the gender pay gaps of individual companies with more than 100 employees for the first time.

The report highlighted some glaring, some eye-watering, and some actually non-existent pay gaps in these businesses.

Since then much has been said and written about the pay disparity between men and women, and its timely release before the celebration of International Women’s Day. Women leaders echoed multiple calls against tokenistic cupcakes on March 8 (including by SmartCompany’s own Tegan Jones who filed an exclusive by trading those sweets for an FOI into the Boosting Female Founders program).

But there was another media diversity startup that had its unique take on the practice.

Missing Perspectives, a social impact entity that aims to challenge the underrepresentation of women in newsrooms, delivered cupcakes to companies on International Women’s Day. The twist? It had the companies’ gender pay gaps written on top of the icing. 

“When the gender pay gap data was released the week prior, we were trying to figure out a clever way to combine this new data as part of a tongue-in-cheek campaign around IWD,” Missing Perspectives founder Phoebe Saintilan-Stocks told SmartCompany. 

“We actually had the brainwave the morning of IWD — so had to race out to execute and film: put the gender pay gaps on the icing on cupcakes, and leave them out the front of businesses in Sydney CBD”, she reveals.  

The video of the team dropping cupcakes out in front of some of the big banks, law firms, and consulting firms in the Sydney CBD has since gone viral, raking in thousands of views on Instagram and TikTok.

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“We didn’t have time to have the cupcakes professionally made, so we had to literally print and cut up the pay gaps and put on the cupcakes ourselves,” Saintilan-Stocks explains.

She says while they did not receive any response from the businesses where they left the cupcakes, they did receive curious looks from the security and concierge staff at their offices.

Talking about the response to their video, Saintilan-Stocks says the videos “really blew up” on Instagram and Tiktok.

“I think it just really resonated with our audience, which is predominantly women aged 25-44,” she says. 

“People have left messages saying that they want to contribute to the campaign next year to scale and get a wider reach and impact. We’re definitely going to take it up a notch next year but hopefully, there’ll be lower pay gaps. I’m so glad it landed well,” she adds.