Moorhead Business Owner Strikes Over Gender Pay Gap

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A local woman is holding a one-day strike to raise awareness of the gender wage gap.

The strike is encouraging local women to take the day off.

KVVR’s Brittany Ford joins us live with more.

TJ and Allison, one local business owner will be taking an unpaid day off by closing her doors tomorrow and is hoping that other local women will do the same

Local business owner Carrie Leopold had the idea to create a Facebook event to strike which she named “Take Back a Day”.

Carrie owns Nerd Nook in the Moorhead Center Mall.

The goal of the strike is to bring awareness to the income gap between men and women.

“Women to kind of band together to take back a day so this strike idea came up and it’s not that we were planning a big strike and picking or any of that It’s really an awareness day”

Recognizing that not every woman has the ability to take a day off event coordinators offer an alternative to get involved.

“And for those women who can’t take the day off tomorrow what the Facebook strike is encouraging is to suspend your purchases for one day”

The current statistics show that women in North Dakota make 70-cents of every dollar made by a man makes.

The strike which falls on national equal pay day not only hopes to bring awareness but also visibility in how women help the local economy.

“And if a female business owner were able to go head and do that you would be able to take a good look at whose running the businesses around here and for North Dakota and the Fargo-Moorhead area there’s a good number of women business owners”

This is the first year of the event and they hope it will encourage local women to start more of a conversation about equal pay.

Reporting live Brittany Ford KVVR NEWS.