John Oliver Explains
John Oliver has a darkly comic solution to the male-female pay gap
John Oliver, in a Last Week Tonight clip posted Monday, tackled the contentious issue of the gender pay gap. American women earn less than their male counterparts, something that President Obama has rightly railed against a number of times, Oliver said. He didn't let Obama off the hook — one study showed that female White House staffers earned 88 cents to the dollar versus male employees — but his main focus was on the people who deny or try to explain away the wage gap, or haggle over the size of the gap.
The bottom line in all of this is that "paying people less for the same work is clearly wrong — even monkeys know that," Oliver said, showing a clip of monkeys in fact getting mad at their own version of a pay gap. But at the end, he also presented a solution of sorts to fix the pay gap. The video has a note affixed to the bottom: "Solution proposed is 100 percent sarcastic." In case you were wondering. (This is HBO — there's some mildly NSFW language) --Peter Weber