When dining out, the general rule for splitting a bill is to divide it evenly amongst the diners, or to go Dutch and divide the expenses based on who ordered what. While the calculator on your smartphone and various apps can help sort out bills, taxes and tips, a new app about to hit iOS stores, called EquiPay, does all that and then some.
EquiPay splits your bill while factoring in the gender and race pay gap using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. After all, with women earning 79 cents to the man’s dollar, it’s only fitting that they pay 79 percent of their share of the bill.
“Equipay helps you avoid the entrenched discrimination that exists in our society. It doesn't split the bill equally—it splits it equitably,” says the firm's site. “You pay what you should to balance out the wage gap.”
The app was created by Luna Malbroux, a diversity educator and comedian from California, for Comedy Hack Day.
“I hope that this, more than anything, starts a discussion and helps people to start thinking a little bit differently about how we can use more technology and more innovation to address inequality and wage inequality,” said Malbroux.
To use the app, users select friends from their in-app friends list and the built-in “diversity tracker” will take gender and race into account to calculate the bill. Users have a “protest” option, which lets them choose why they think their higher bill is unfair; the app will then deliver a rebuttal.
And, should the user not have a diverse group of friends, then the app will have a surcharge for its services.
“When dining out with a high privilege group, Equipay automatically adds an EquipayItBack Surcharge,” reads the app’s website. “This fee subsidizes meals for others and funds Equipay's charitable arm.”
While the app admittedly does not account for all kinds of privilege, it takes pay discrepancies into account when it comes to race.
“Asian males make more, per dollar, than white males and so that is demonstrated in the app,” said Malbroux. “But we're not saying that Asians don't face any types of issues as a minority. The wage gap and how race and gender affects that based on statistics and historical oppression,' said Malbroux. 'It's reparations…one meal at a time.”
