Want Equal Pay? Go to Prison, Says Belgian Campaign

There are plenty of reasons a woman might want to change jobs: better pay, more flexibility, a shorter commute or perhaps a manager who does not schedule a 4pm meeting and call it “a quick catch-up”. Going to prison is generally not on the list.

But a provocative Belgian campaign has found one unlikely advantage to working behind bars: men and women who work in prison receive the same fixed rate.

That uncomfortable fact forms the basis of ZIJkant’s latest Equal Pay Day campaign. Created by Belgian advertising agency mortierbrigade and produced by CZAR, the film follows a group of women who appear strangely desperate to get arrested.

One steals openly. Another informs the police that she intends to rob a jewellery shop. A woman walks out of a museum carrying a painting, while another discovers a bank robbery in progress and enthusiastically joins in. They are not particularly good criminals, but that is exactly the point. They want to be caught.

Their destination is prison because, according to the campaign, it is one of the few working environments where gender does not determine the compensation prisoners receive for their work.

Then comes the line that makes sense of the absurdity: “There is no gender pay gap in prison. Let’s close it everywhere else.”

It is funny until you think about why the joke works.

The story behind ZIJkant’s Equal Pay Day campaign

The campaign was launched for Equal Pay Day in Belgium on 12 March 2026 by ZIJkant, a progressive Belgian women’s rights organisation that has been campaigning around the issue for more than two decades.

Equal Pay Day is built around a deliberately simple idea. Instead of describing the gender pay gap only as a percentage, the campaign translates inequality into time. If women earn less over a year on average, how much longer would they theoretically have to work before their annual earnings catch up with men’s?

For ZIJkant’s 2026 campaign, that calculation took women into March. The organisation says the gap between the average gross annual earnings of male and female employees in Belgium remains around 20%.

That means the women frantically trying to get arrested in the film are not really the joke. The labour market is.

The creative team pushes that contradiction as far as possible. Prison is normally associated with losing freedom, yet in the campaign it becomes a place where women finally encounter one thing they have been demanding outside prison walls: a compensation system that does not distinguish between men and women.

It is an excellent advertising idea. It is also much more complicated than the advert initially makes it sound.

Do women in Belgium really earn 20% less than men?

This is where the campaign deserves both praise and scrutiny.

Search for the gender pay gap in Belgium and you can find figures that appear to contradict the campaign completely. Belgium’s official statistics office, Statbel, reports that the country’s harmonised gender pay gap was just 0.7% in 2023, based on average gross hourly wages.

That is remarkably low. Statbel says Belgium had the second-lowest gender pay gap in the European Union by that particular measure, behind Luxembourg.

So how can Belgium’s gender pay gap be both 0.7% and around 20%? The answer is that the figures measure different things.

ZIJkant’s headline figure looks at average gross annual earnings, including people working full-time and part-time, while the harmonised Statbel figure compares average hourly wages. ZIJkant itself says that when working time is taken into account, its pay-gap calculation falls from around 20% to approximately 7%.

That distinction matters enormously. The campaign should not be interpreted as saying that every Belgian woman receives 20% less than a man sitting next to her doing exactly the same job.

The bigger story is about what happens across an entire working year and, ultimately, across an entire career. That may actually be a more interesting problem than the headline statistic suggests.

The gender pay gap is also a working-time gap

Belgium provides a particularly revealing statistic here. According to Statbel, 40.5% of female employees in Belgium worked part-time in 2024, compared with just 12.8% of male employees.

That is an enormous difference, and it raises a more difficult question than simply asking whether employers pay women and men the same hourly rate: why are women so much more likely to work fewer paid hours in the first place?

The answer takes the conversation away from payroll departments and into people’s homes. Children need collecting, nurseries close, someone has to stay home when a child is ill, elderly relatives may need care and school holidays have to be covered. While every family is different, caring responsibilities still do not fall equally between men and women.

For many women, choosing part-time work may therefore be less of a lifestyle choice than the word “choosing” suggests. It can be the most practical way of keeping a family running.

The consequences can extend far beyond the immediate reduction in salary. Fewer paid hours can contribute to slower career progression, smaller pension contributions and lower lifetime earnings. A gender earnings gap can therefore begin long before anybody decides what number to put on a payslip.

Why the prison idea works

The best social campaigns often take an enormous, complicated problem and reduce it to one idea people can understand immediately. This campaign does exactly that: if you want guaranteed gender-neutral compensation, go to prison.

It is ridiculous enough to make people stop, and advertising needs people to stop.

The film also avoids the familiar formula of worthy social campaigns filled with sombre music, serious faces, statistics appearing dramatically on screen and a final instruction to “start a conversation”. Instead, it uses comedy.

The women are not presented simply as victims. They actively participate in the joke, committing increasingly ridiculous crimes to escape an equally ridiculous situation. That makes the campaign memorable and shareable.

For an issue such as equal pay, which has been discussed for decades and risks becoming familiar enough for audiences to scroll straight past it, that ability to attract attention matters.

But attracting attention and creating change are not necessarily the same thing.

Prison is not exactly a model workplace

There is an obvious danger in presenting prison as some strange paradise of workplace equality, and ZIJkant appears well aware of it.

The organisation acknowledges that prisoners’ compensation is extremely low and that prison labour falls outside normal employment law. The campaign also arrived against the backdrop of serious overcrowding within Belgium’s prison system.

Nobody is genuinely arguing that women should aspire to prison working conditions. The equality exists because compensation is fixed, not because prisons have somehow discovered the perfect progressive employment model.

That distinction is important. There is also an ethical question for the advertising itself. When a campaign turns prison into a comedy device, it risks trivialising the experiences of people who actually live and work within the prison system.

The campaign can be defended because its absurdity is obvious. Nobody watching a woman deliberately stealing a museum painting is seriously expected to conclude that incarceration is desirable.

However, social advertising always faces another risk: the creative idea can become more famous than the issue it was created to promote. People may remember “that funny advert where women try to get arrested” without remembering what the statistics actually said.

A great campaign earns attention. A truly effective campaign also has to decide what to do with that attention afterwards.

ZIJkant has made provocation part of its strategy

This is not the organisation’s first attempt to make economic inequality deliberately uncomfortable.

For its 2025 Equal Pay Day campaign, ZIJkant and mortierbrigade used another provocative proposition: “Working with women is a real privilege — especially when they cost you 20% less.”

The language deliberately borrowed the logic of bargain shopping and applied it to employees. Other ZIJkant campaigns have similarly portrayed women’s labour as though it were being sold at a discount.

It is an effective recurring strategy because percentages are easy to ignore. A figure such as 20% can feel abstract, while describing women as “20% off” sounds grotesque. Telling women to go to prison if they want equal pay sounds ridiculous.

The campaign takes something society has learned to discuss politely and makes it impolite again.

Other organisations have tried the same advertising trick

Some of the most successful equality campaigns have worked for exactly the same reason: they make an invisible inequality visible.

People Like Us, a UK organisation campaigning for workplace equality, did this with its Autocorrected Pay Gap campaign. The idea began with an everyday experience familiar to many people with non-Western names: autocorrect decides their name must be wrong and replaces it with a more familiar one.

The campaign transformed that small technological irritation into a discussion about a much larger problem, asking whether systems, workplaces and institutions can contain biases that favour some people over others. It used billboards and familiar technology to make an abstract discussion about ethnicity and pay immediately understandable.

Then there is Fearless Girl, one of the best-known examples of gender-equality advertising in recent years.

Installed opposite Wall Street’s Charging Bull in New York in 2017, the statue of a young girl standing defiantly with her hands on her hips became an instantly recognisable symbol. The visual was extraordinarily simple: a small girl facing a giant bull. It required little explanation.

Fearless Girl also provides a warning for brands entering social issues. State Street, the company behind the campaign, subsequently faced scrutiny over its own record on gender and pay.

That revealed an uncomfortable rule of purpose-led advertising: when an organisation asks the world to behave better, people will eventually ask whether that organisation follows the same standards itself.

That is not a reason for brands or organisations to avoid campaigning. It is a reason to make sure the substance behind a campaign is as strong as the creative work in front of it.

Equal pay is moving from advertising into legislation

The timing makes ZIJkant’s 2026 campaign particularly interesting because Europe’s debate about equal pay is no longer confined to campaign films and International Women’s Day posts.

The EU Pay Transparency Directive is intended to make unexplained pay differences more visible and give workers greater access to information about how pay is determined. The rules include measures around salary information for job applicants, salary-history questions, workers’ access to pay information and gender pay-gap reporting requirements for qualifying employers.

One particularly significant element concerns employers where reporting reveals a gender pay gap of at least 5% within a category of workers that cannot be justified using objective, gender-neutral factors and is not corrected within the required period. In those circumstances, employers may be required to conduct a joint pay assessment.

Transparency matters because it is difficult for an employee to challenge an unexplained salary difference when they have no way of knowing that difference exists.

This also creates an opportunity for campaigns such as ZIJkant’s. Rather than stopping at awareness, they could help ordinary workers understand what pay-transparency legislation actually means for them. Clear guidance could explain when salary information should be provided during recruitment, what information employees can request about pay levels, how comparable work is assessed and what options exist when a worker suspects unjustified pay discrimination.

Those are practical questions that affect people’s working lives. A campaign that answers them becomes more than memorable advertising; it becomes a useful resource.

Equal hourly pay does not automatically create equal careers

This is where campaigns about the gender pay gap need to evolve.

Belgium is a fascinating example precisely because its official hourly gender pay gap is comparatively small. If the conversation stopped there, the country might appear to have almost solved the problem.

Yet the enormous difference between the proportion of Belgian women and men working part-time tells another story.

Closing a gender earnings gap therefore requires more than simply telling employers to pay women more. It means examining who provides unpaid care, whether affordable childcare is available, whether fathers are encouraged and able to take parental leave, whether part-time employees have realistic routes into senior positions, whether flexible working damages someone’s chances of promotion and whether salary structures are sufficiently transparent.

It also requires looking much further ahead. A woman who reduces her working hours in her thirties may not experience the financial consequences only in that year. Lower earnings can affect savings, investments, career progression and retirement income decades later.

That is a far more complicated problem to fit onto a billboard, but it is where the discussion about equal pay becomes considerably more meaningful.

What could campaigns like this do better?

ZIJkant has already achieved one of the hardest things in advertising: it has created an idea people may actually want to talk about. The next opportunity is turning that attention into something useful.

For example, the campaign could direct audiences to an Equal Pay Calculator showing how differences in working hours, salary increases, promotions and pension contributions accumulate over ten, twenty or thirty years. A 5%, 7% or 20% difference stops being an abstract statistic when it is translated into a house deposit, childcare costs, savings or retirement income.

Employers could also be offered a practical pay-audit toolkit encouraging them to examine whether men and women enter equivalent roles on comparable salaries, who receives the largest pay rises, who gets promoted, who works part-time and what happens to employees’ careers after parental leave.

Campaigns could also explain new pay-transparency rights in ordinary language. Instead of expecting workers to understand complicated legislation, an Equal Pay Day website could answer common questions about salary ranges, access to pay information, previous-salary questions and what employees can do when they discover an unexplained difference in pay.

This would also improve the campaign’s value in search. People do not necessarily Google the name of an advertising campaign when they experience a workplace problem. They are more likely to search phrases such as “gender pay gap Belgium”, “equal pay Belgium”, “EU pay transparency rules”, “salary transparency Belgium”, “why do women earn less than men?” or “what can I do if I am paid less than a colleague?”

Building useful answers around those searches would allow the campaign to continue working long after the film disappears from social feeds.

So, what is Belgium’s real gender pay gap?

Perhaps the most important takeaway is that there is no useful answer without first asking which gender pay gap is being discussed.

The official harmonised Belgian statistic for 2023 puts the difference in average gross hourly wages at 0.7%. ZIJkant’s Equal Pay Day campaign looks at average gross annual earnings and puts the gap at approximately 20%, while the organisation says that after correcting its calculation for working time, the difference falls to around 7%.

Those figures should not be treated as interchangeable because they answer different questions.

Understanding that distinction actually strengthens the wider discussion rather than weakening it. Belgium’s relatively small hourly pay gap suggests substantial progress has been made, while its much larger annual earnings gap points towards another layer of inequality involving working hours, caring responsibilities and career patterns.

That is a richer and more credible conversation than simply repeating the statement that “women earn 20% less than men” without explaining what the figure represents.

A funny advert about something that is not very funny

Ultimately, the reason ZIJkant’s campaign works is that it takes its argument to a ridiculous conclusion. If the outside labour market cannot guarantee economic equality, perhaps women should try prison.

Of course they should not. That is precisely why the joke works.

After the museum thefts, bank robberies and deliberately incompetent criminals have made people laugh, however, the campaign leaves behind a serious question about what equal pay really means.

If a country can reduce its hourly gender pay gap to less than one per cent while women remain dramatically more likely to work part-time and earn considerably less across a year, salary alone was probably never the entire problem.

The deeper issue is about who has the opportunity to build an uninterrupted, well-paid career and who is more likely to fit paid employment around childcare, caring responsibilities and everything else that needs to be done.

That is where this campaign is at its strongest. It does not provide all the answers, and prison certainly is not a beacon of workplace equality. What it does successfully is take something familiar — the gender pay gap — and make it strange enough for people to look at it again.

The next challenge for ZIJkant, and for campaigns like it, is turning that second look into action. After more than two decades of Equal Pay Day campaigning, the ultimate measure of success is not how many people watch, like or share the next advert.

It is whether, eventually, there is no longer a reason to make one.