Sarah Silverman creates provocative new video on women's salaries and 'the $500,000 vagina tax'

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The comedian and writer launches a campaign to crowdfund the $30tn in wages American women lose over their careers

Sarah Silverman is a “vagina owner”. So for her, and millions of other women, that means making less money than men who have the same job.

In a provocative and NSFW video featuring mocking pictures of penises, Silverman gives voice to outrage about the wage gap.

“Every year, the average woman loses $11,000 to the wage gap,” says Silverman, sitting in a doctor’s office, in a video for the Equal Payback Project. The comedian purports to undergo a procedure to “become a dude”.

The project addresses the glaring disparity in pay working women face in the US. According to the US Census Bureau’s September poverty report, women continue to make 78 cents to every dollar that men make.

While that may be one way to solve the wage gap problem, the campaign aims to close the wage gap by crowd funding an admittedly ludicrous number: $29,811,746,430,000. That “vagina tax”, as Silverman names it, represents the how much women lose when each of the US’s 69 million female workers are paid nearly $500,000 less than men over their working careers.

The money raised from the Equal Payback Project will go towards funding the National Women’s Law Center – a non-profit that works against employment discrimination and focuses on legislative issues to promote gender equality. “They fight to help women get the money they deserve,” Silverman says, waving a prosthetic penis, about the areas that the organisation works in. “They’re very good at what they do, you know, for a bunch of girls.”

Several activists consistently highlight the economic divide between working men and women, a fact even that even prompted Hillary Clinton to weigh in.

Silverman’s video is below. Fair warning: it contains provocative imagery that may not be appropriate for all workplaces.