Christian Yang, an assistant professor of English literature at the University of Calgary, was inspired after talking with fellow professors at the University of Alberta and the University of British Columbia about how she was attempting to create her own version of a feminist narrative and came up with a very simple, easy-to-follow structure.

“The first principle of a feminist narrative is that all the stories we tell have to start with some kind of struggle or struggle for freedom, meaning we must start with a struggle,” she says.

You need a structure of narrative before any of it can make sense.

Yang has been building a short narrative that would make a good introduction to feminist themes. Yang says she’s heard her own version of narratives with her own friends and peers used to describe the gender pay gap.

“It’s a very interesting thing to say ‘I’ve always been aware of that but I’ve never told anyone, ‘Oh, I felt this way because of my gender’,” says Yang.

You need a structure to set the stage, say you’ve done all of your homework.

You need a structure before any of it can make sense.

You could also start by making a list of “why we should care about pay” and what are the key obstacles, and then build a narrative from that. Then you could build it up.

For someone starting at the bottom of the ladder, a lot of women are worried about the pay gap. There’s a lot of anecdotal evidence to back up that claim.

Yang says that the pay gap, in the simplest terms, is the fact that, on average, women are paid less than men for doing exactly the same jobs. A 2013 survey by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that women were paid 57.6 cents for every dollar men were paid in 2010, up from 53 cents in 1980, when the gender wage gap was just 2.4 cents.

The National Day of Accountability for Women in the workplace movement is being held this week. But it may be good timing for the pay gap.

“All things in nature are connected. We need to pay it respect so it doesn’t continue to be as prevalent as it has become,” says Yang.

Yang says as we try to understand what it means we talk to all our peers to try to get them to see it. Sometimes we know we should talk about it, but we stay away