Fifth Wave Feminists published a chapter on wage gaps and negotiating pay in the book Walking on Broken Glass later this month.

For decades, women have been told to work harder, be better, don't be difficult, and equality will come. It was a lie. We did everything we were told and more. We earned all the degrees. We played corporate politics. We delayed families. We carried the invisible labor. We played by the rules. Only to find out the game is rigged. The men who enabled Jeffrey Epstein continue to walk free. Hundreds of women are killed by current or former intimate partners every year. Diseases that affect millions of women remain chronically underfunded and understudied. Women spend years waiting for diagnoses while being told their pain is stress, anxiety, or hormones. We are still punished professionally for becoming mothers, expected to carry the overwhelming burden of unpaid care, and told to be grateful for the opportunity. We are done waiting for equality to arrive on someone else's timetable. GenX women, in particular, have woken up to the harsh reality that we enjoyed the best “equality” the United States had to offer and are angry that an already broken system is going backwards. Nikita Gill, the feminist poet said it best: "There is nothing you can do or say to appease the patriarchy. It is a forever hungry beast... There is no point in making yourself so small that you live half a life, or a quarter of a life, to appease a beast that hates you anyway.” We are here to put a stake in the ground that women are not the problem to be fixed. The barriers are structural, cultural, economic, and political. Fifth Wave Feminists refuse to watch another generation teach women how to survive systems that continue to fail us. And we are here to change the game.