The glossy, millennial world of Instagram seems like the kind of community where, if you have an authentic voice, create beautiful pictures and work hard for your posts, you could earn the big bucks. Better still, in an environment driven by likes, and where most of us who engage with the platform are female, you’d think any gender pay gap would be old news. Take our favourite fitness gurus; 17 of the top 20 fitstagrammers are women according to a new survey. And yet… the same survey also reveals that the highest paid is, sigh, a man.
That man is the apparently unstoppable Joe Wicks, aka The Body Coach. He is reported to earn around £12m a year, despite his 1.9m followers placing him just 21st in the global rankings. Meanwhile, the holder of the number-one spot, the equally physically impressive American female Sommer Ray, with 17.2m followers, earns £4m. You can do the maths. Eight times the reach equals one-third of the pay. Shocking by any comparison – but take this one: the biggest professional pay gap is between female and male GPs, where men earn on average 41 per cent more.