Wage gaps based on race and gender are high up on everyone's agenda as of recently, though the government seems slow to taking action to rectify them through policy. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2014, women who worked full time made 83 percent of what men made annually. In 2013, black men earned 75.1 percent of what white men earned and hispanic men made only 67.2 percent. A new app called Equitable, winner of the Grand Prize at Comedy Hack Day in San Francisco, puts the power to change this into the hands of users by splitting group bills based on everyone's race and gender.

The gender scale is fluid between male and female and the bill gets split "accounting for history", based on actual wage gap statistics between groups. Find out how diverse your friend group is from Oscars to College Brochure, and face a $5 surcharge if your group isn't diverse enough (AKA if you're all white males). If you don't accept the "affirmative fractions," you can protest and face a slew of specific facts on wage disparities based on gender and racial identity. Equitable proudly stands by its slogan, "Reparations one bill at a time."

While the app was designed for a comedy competition and has a sarcastic feel to it, at its core it creates a platform for more open, meaningful dialogue about these issues that have become institutionalized in our society. Few forums or settings are able to accomplish this, or promote awareness about the shocking statistics. It may be ideas like these that facilitate solutions to these problems in the future or push the government to act on them.