A New York City woman has gone viral for tweeting about her fight for equal pay.
Kimberly Nguyen, a 25-year-old user experience writer, tweeted earlier this month that she saw a job listing for a full-time position with her company that pays as much as $90,000 more than what she makes as a contractor in the same position.
In a tweet that now has more than 12 million views, Nguyen said that she found out about the salary disparity thanks to a salary transparency law that went into effect in New York City last October.
The law requires companies with at least four employees, with at least one based in the city, to include a minimum and maximum salary on job listings, according to the New York City Commission on Human Rights, which is enforcing the law.
When Nguyen saw her company’s job posting this month, which listed a much higher salary for a full-time role, she said she took to Twitter mainly to vent her frustration.
“I was so upset,” she told Good Morning America. “To know that [full-time employees] are making anywhere between $32,000 to $90,000 more than what I’m making for essentially the same work felt rude and disrespectful.”
Nguyen said she is also a poet and she expected her tweet to reach her “poet friends” on Twitter, not to go viral. “I didn’t intend to be the poet laureate of pay transparency,” she said.
In the United States, women on average make 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to the Pew Research Center. The number has not budged in recent years, and it’s even worse for mothers, women of color and all women as they age, data shows.