Step away from your keyboard, don’t reply to that email and forget about doing a tea run. If you’re a woman, you’re not getting paid for the rest of the year.
Today marks Equal Pay Day, the time during the year when female staff essentially begin to work for free because of the difference between what men and women earn in the UK.
Recent figures indicate that although the gender pay gap has closed slightly since 2015, women still earn 13.9 per cent less than their male counterparts. That means that we get just 86p for every £1 a man takes home.
Women in Iceland have finished work at 2.38pm on 24 October for the last 11 years to reflect the time they would actually finish if they earnt the same as their male colleagues. Inspired by this, French campaign group Les Glorieuses urged women to strike on Monday, abandoning their positions at 4.27pm to protest the pay gap and raise awareness of the continuing disparity in 2016.
Change is afoot in the UK, too. It's been a year since Grazia won our Mind The Pay Gap campaign, which changed a law to help benefit female workers across the UK.
The campaign begun in response to the continuing difference between the salaries of male and female colleagues. Thanks to the support of Grazia's readers, we were able to persuade former Prime Minister David Cameron to introduce mandatory pay audits, under which big companies that employ more than 250 people will have to publish details of their male and female staff's pay. This transparency will help women challenge unfair pay in the work place.