Women get a bite less in every pay.
A Pay Transparency Members’ Bill is sitting in a biscuit tin at New Zealand Parliament, waiting for the chance to be drawn. Still Minding the Gap wanted to build public awareness of the Bill, gather signatures in support and create enough pressure for Members of Parliament to take notice.
The creative opportunity was sitting inside the story itself. Members’ bills are literally drawn from a biscuit tin, giving us a familiar and distinctly Kiwi object through which to explain a complex political process. The challenge was to connect this parliamentary detail with the gender pay gap without creating two competing ideas—or losing the all-important call to action.
Our answer was to make the biscuit the campaign’s central metaphor.
Women don’t receive a different kind of pay. They simply receive a bite less of it. A biscuit with a piece missing turned an abstract percentage into something immediate and easy to understand: women are being shortchanged in every pay. Other familiar biscuits allowed us to express the scale of the gap through headlines such as “Hundreds of thousands? Try $40,000.”
The biscuit tin then became the mechanism for change. “Lift the lid to close the pay gap” connected the everyday language of transparency with the Members’ Bill ballot, while “Add your biscuit to the tin” gave signing in support a simple, participatory meaning. Across each execution, the communication hierarchy remained clear: expose the inequality, explain the Bill and direct people to stillmindingthegap.nz. The resulting system was applied across out-of-home, street posters, social media and the campaign landing page.
The design language brings together three contrasting worlds. The first is the dry, opaque world of accounting reports, salary data and corporate disclosure. Black-and-white imagery, photocopied paper textures, roughly applied tape and fragmented information reference documents that have been copied, obscured, redacted or kept out of sight.
The second influence comes from historic feminist, workers’ rights and union posters. Oversized condensed typography, direct language and deliberately imperfect layouts give the campaign the urgency of something created to be pasted to a wall and noticed. A single bright blue cuts through the monochrome palette, unifying the system and giving the messages a contemporary campaigning energy.
Against this institutional backdrop, the biscuits provide warmth, familiarity and a touch of wit. They make the issue accessible without making light of it. Bites are removed, lollies are unevenly distributed and portions are visibly smaller—using food to make unequal pay feel tangible. Black-and-white cut-out hands add a human, activist quality, showing people lifting the lid, holding up a biscuit and taking part.
We also proposed taking the campaign into workplaces through a Friday afternoon tea held at the symbolic point in the day when women effectively stop being paid because of the gender pay gap. Staff would bring biscuits, start a conversation and discuss what pay transparency could mean within their own organisation. This extends the campaign beyond public signatures, encouraging employers to examine their own figures and voluntarily report their gender pay gaps.
The result is a campaign that takes an obscure parliamentary process and turns it into a simple public action. One biscuit explains the inequality. One tin explains the opportunity. And one clear invitation asks New Zealanders to help lift the lid.
Client: Still Minding the Gap
Agency: Ocean Design
Creative, Art Direction, Design and Writing: Brent Courtney
Creative and Writer: Mark Easterbrook