Life

"Pinksourcing": The ~Bright Side~ To The Wage Gap

Perk up, y'all! Because even though you've been constantly fretting about only making 77 cents to a man's dollar on the job and the fact that, despite Obama's efforts, the wage gap hasn't closed during the two terms he's been in office, Kristen Bell's "Pinksourcing" parody of the wage gap shows us the ~bright~ side of losing upwards of $430,000 in pay over the course of our careers. What's "Pinksourcing," you may ask? Why, it's the new version of outsourcing guaranteed to help any business — because why pay a man to do something a woman will do just as successfully, for a whole bunch less?

The video, the first of The Huffington Post's new "Celebs Have Issues" series, highlights just how absurd the reality of the wage gap is as Kristen Bell gives a tour of an office full of women and sells an imaginary business on the "benefits" of hiring them. For instance, not only can you pay them less, but you can totally forego covering all those pesky ~women's issues~ like covering birth control. After all, we'll be too distracted by the baked goods and free tampons in the bathroom to care!

Watch the video below to get fired up about the wage gap (and oddly fired up about her reprisal of Anna in Frozen 2 — don't look at me):

But what makes this video so necessary is that it sheds light on an even more massive issue that gets overlooked when we're up in arms about the wage gap: the fact that women of color make even less on the dollar, with black women making 60 and Hispanic women making 55 cents on the dollar. That adds up to a whole lot of "Nope."

This actually isn't the first time female comedians have taken on the wage gap. Sarah Silverman's Equal Payback Project commercial from 2014 was yet another example of a brilliantly done deadpan presentation of how ridiculous the wage gap is — the only bummer being, of course, that between Silverman and Bell's awesome sketches, not much has changed on the wage gap front.

What's great about videos like these is that they take complex and troubling topics and make them that much more accessible to people by demonstrating the unfairness of them in a digestible way — humor is a great tool to bring issues like this to light. And Bell's video collaboration also comes with a call-to-action. To help the cause, you can visit the site for "I Am That Girl," a program that aims to help empower and build confidence in young women. Because true life, y'all: If we're going to fix this wage gap in our lifetime, we have to make sure we all have the tools to make it happen, especially the next generation.

#Bless to literal Disney Princess Kristen Bell for choosing this as her topic to focus on for "Celebs Have Issues," because it deserves all the attention it can get.

Images: Huffington Post/Facebook; Giphy