Provoking Conversation about Unequal Pay in a Work Environment Through Design: Women’s Empowerment in HCI

Women have for centuries been subject to systematic disadvantages, especially in regard to unequal pay. With the move to the third wave HCI, empowerment has become a central focus area and an interesting research aim for the HCI community. Through studies with women, we learned that women experience gender inequality and feel non-empowered at their workplace. We have engaged ourselves with this topic as an interest to investigate how we through a critical design can stay with the trouble of unequal pay to provoke conversation and empower women in a work environment. Towards the end of the paper, we report on a field study and conclude by reflecting on staying with the trouble through conversations, how provocation helped the participants stay with the trouble of unequal pay, and the reliability of our guidelines for empowerment. With this paper, we contribute to research within women’s empowerment in the work environment.