Living in an increasingly quantified world, metric systems have gained greater power over defining our individual value and visibility. Responding to the emotional tension created by these divisive metrics, The Gender Pay Gap Work Song is a methodology born from a singular piece of crochet dictating the statistics of the Global Average Gender Pay Gap. A crochet work song is composed from the politicised piece of crochet, inviting women devalued by these metrics to respond to them by collectively crocheting to the work song in spaces where metrics continue to be produced and circulated at an unmeasurable rate.
Crochet pieces created in these spaces are deconstructed and re-iterated into a new series of work songs, encapsulating each crocheter's site-specific emotional response to the sound of the Global Average Gender Pay Gap. This cyclical manner of data translation through historical forms of feminist labour mirrors that of the exclusive cycle of metric production and handling, reframing crochet as an instructive form of technology.
Aiming to challenge the power of metrics in justifying and maintaining inequality in our world, The Gender Pay Gap Work Song prompts women to reclaim their labour and the spaces producing these gendered metrics. The performance of this collective act of resistance hopes to diversify the metric world through the inclusion of tactile, auditory and collective labour; bringing emotions to the forefront of the methods we employ to dictate our realities.
