Mar 18, 22 | 5 min read
influencers gender pay gap
Reading time: 5 minutes
It's 2022 and I'm no longer surprised by the gender pay gap. This is still the order of the day for many companies, even those that are taking the side of women's struggle in their external channels.
But I confess that the following data took me by surprise, and although the algorithm gives you a very different feed than mine, I am sure that this will also shock you: despite the fact that women are the majority in the influencer marketing niche, it is men who earn more. This is demonstrated by the new study published by the influencer marketing company Izea .
According to the study, men earn, on average, 30% more than female influencers per post. And my surprise is that we see more women as influencers than men. So, in my basic understanding of math and proportions, they are the ones who should earn more. Do you agree?
But that is not what happens…
What is the image in numbers?
According to the Izea study, in 2021 women accounted for 85% of the sponsorships made as influencers. However, over the past five years, men have been the highest paid despite having a significantly smaller presence in the area.
To give you an idea of the bigger picture, the average trinidad and tobago email address amount paid to men per post was USD 2,978, which is 30% more than what women were paid.
Only in one situation was the scenario reversed: in the Instagram Stories format, women earned an average of USD 962 per post, while the average amount paid to men was around USD 609.
2021 was the first time that women earned more than men as influencers.
Perhaps with this last paragraph you feel that we have hope for equal pay, but unfortunately the situation remains unequal and reinforces gender stereotypes. What do I mean by this? I will answer below.
Another study on digital advertising found that brands spend more on ads that portray traditional gender roles.
Women make up 58% of characters in consumer packaged goods (CPG) ads and men only 41%, according to research from Creative X. The results are based on the analysis of 3,406 ads with 6,435 personas served during 2020 and 2021 in the US.
However:
41% of the characters portrayed in professional environments were men;
49% of advertising investment showed men in professional environments;
Only 44% of all female characters analyzed were in professional environments;
24% was spent on ads starring women (almost half the investment compared to the same type of ad with men)
Presence and stereotypes yes, money no
In summary:
It's good that women have more presence in ads, but the market doesn't feel comfortable letting them be widely seen as professionals, so it invests almost twice as much in ads of men occupying work spaces.
Also, there is a big problem with the fact that women are the majority in a profession, but most of the money goes to men (for the same job!).
In my opinion as a Rock Content professional working with Social Impact and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI): brands and the influencer marketing business love having women present and pretending to be progressive about gender equality. But money and investment are still treated as “men’s things.”
As long as women continue to receive less for the same service performed by men, the impediment to our socioeconomic growth will remain. Unfortunately, gender equality is still not a real commitment even in the most seemingly modern spaces . And that is why we have to be vigilant.
How do we practice change?
As I said in the previous paragraph, we must be vigilant, and not just women, but all people who want to be allies for gender equality.
Recently, in 2022, we had a good example of what it is like to practice this intentional surveillance. A Twitter bot was developed to interact with all the brands that have tweeted something about International Women's Day.
In this way, when brands used hashtags related to the date, the bot automatically created a commented retweet showing the gender pay gap within the company that posted the post.
