Backlash to university's gender pay gap bake sale highlights 'trend of online behaviour towards women'.

By Eliza Buzacott-Speer

A “gender pay gap” bake sale to be held at the University of Queensland (UQ) during its Feminist Week, which will charge based on gender, has sparked outrage from students and threats of violence towards the organisers.

Madeline Price, the vice-president of gender and sexuality at the UQ Student Union, said the response to the Brisbane event highlighted an “underlying trend in online behaviour towards women” that has “galvanised the feminist community on campus”.

Feminist Week is held on the UQ campus each semester, hosted by the UQ Union (UQU), UQU Women’s Collective and UQ Women’s Department.

A series of events will be held between April 4 and 8, but it is the pay gap bake sale that has drawn the most attention, with many students calling the bake sale discriminatory on the UQ Stalkerspace Facebook page.

The description of the event reads: “Specific to each faculty, each baked good will only cost you the proportion of $1.00 that you earn comparative to men (or, if you identify as a man, all baked goods with cost you $1.00!).

“For example, if you are a woman of colour in the legal profession, a baked good at the stall will only cost you 55 cents!”

A now-deleted post by UQ student Ashley Millsteed that described the bake sale as “blatantly discriminatory against men” cited Queensland’s 1991 Anti-Discrimination Act and the federal 1984 Sex Discrimination Act.

Purpose of bake sale to ‘start a conversation’
Ms Price said the “infamous” bake sale stall was designed to generate discussion, but had instead resulted in rape and death threats towards its organisers.

“The whole purpose of the gender pay gap bake sale was to generate discussion and start a conversation about wage inequality,” she said.

“[But] instead of being genuine discussion about, ‘Oh, a pay gap exists? Let’s talk about this and engage with this issue’, it’s been a lot more personal attacks against the organisers and against members of the Women’s Collective and students of campus.

“We’ve had rape threats and death threats by people who were threatened by the existence of a bake sale that could potentially engage with an issue of inequality.”

Ms Price said there had been some positive responses from students who had recognised that feminism was needed after reading the comments online about the bake sale.

“It’s just been this really interesting dichotomy between people who are threatening attendees and people who’ve been working on the event, and people who are going, ‘Ah, I now see why feminism is relevant, because of the people who are threatening you’,” she said.

Reaction ‘has galvanised the feminist community’

Ms Price said members of the Women’s Collective were disappointed the bake sale had drawn the most attention, but that it highlighted some of the issues the group planned to raise across Feminist Week.

“Obviously it’s there to educate, it’s there to start a discussion, but there’s so many other amazing things happening during Feminist Week,” she said.

“From a personal perspective, the attacks on members of the Women’s Collective have really hit home because we’ve come to realise that whenever a woman raises her voice in the public sphere, the attention that attracts also attracts these rape threats and threats of sexual violence and threats to the life of the woman.

“It’s really interesting because these are some of the discussions that we want to bring out in Feminist Week as well, that the gender pay gap bake sale has brought out this underlying trend of online behaviour towards women.

“It’s a really negative thing, but a good place to start discussion about this as well is that, well, here’s an event we tried to throw on campus and here’s the reaction we’ve received and none of it’s legitimate discussion, it’s just threats.

“It’s been a bit of an interesting experience to say the least but it has galvanised the feminist community on campus because it is now blatantly obvious why this sort of thing needs to be happening.”

The pay gap in Australia currently sits at 17.3 per cent, according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency, while consulting firm Mercer has estimated that gender equality in the workforce is unlikely to be achieved before 2050 at the current rate of change.

This post originally appeared on ABC News.

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