The Pay Check
Activity Overview
Episode publication activity over the past year
Episodes
Evolving Money: The Regulation Revolution (Sponsored Content)
23 Feb 2025
Contributed by Lukas
Just as it took the British government a century to catch up to Jonathan Swift’s innovative person-to-person loan program, the U.S. government h...
Listen Now: Beak Capitalism from Odd Lots
24 Nov 2024
Contributed by Lukas
In this limited series, Odd Lots explains some of the thorniest issues facing the US economy through the medium of … chicken. Chicken occupies a uni...
Spain: A Time-Tested Model for Economic Security
30 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
For the last seven weeks, we’ve gone around the world to see how the pandemic led to more or less economic equality. There were some pleasant surpri...
Singapore: Who Gets to Be Crazy Rich?
22 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Singapore's carefully controlled housing market has been a key factor in its economic success over the last 60 years. But when the pandemic ushered in...
Mexico: Choosing the Economy Over Life
16 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Mexico’s handling of the pandemic has been largely driven by its president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and his desire to keep th...
Hawaii: When a Billionaire Buys Your Hometown
09 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
One of the defining trends of the pandemic has been the creation of extreme wealth at the very top. This week on The Pay Check we take a look at the b...
India: Why Did Working Women Disappear?
02 Jun 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Even before the pandemic, the proportion of women in India's workforce was falling. Covid made it so much worse. This episode of The Pay Check looks a...
Kenya: The Lost Girls
26 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
An increase in teen pregnancies in Kenya is part of a shadow pandemic that ripped through developing nations during Covid, setting women’s progr...
U.S.: Where Cash Made All the Difference
19 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
When the Covid-19 pandemic started, many people expected inequality to get worse in the U.S. But at least for the bottom 50% of Americans, something s...
Brazil: The Cautionary Tale
12 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
This season on the Pay Check, we're going to seven different countries to see how a global pandemic shifted the balance between the richest and the po...
Coming Soon: The Pay Check Season Four
05 May 2022
Contributed by Lukas
The pandemic created a global economic crisis that economists and experts expected would lead to greater wealth inequality than ever before. Host Rebe...
Introducing: White Picket Fence
01 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This special episode of The Pay Check features "What Could Have Been", the latest episode of White Picket Fence from Wonder Media Network.How did the ...
Introducing: Breakthrough
07 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On Breakthrough, a new series from the Prognosis podcast, we explore how the pandemic is changing our understanding of healthcare and medicine. We sta...
Bonus: The Making of The Pay Check
03 Jun 2021
Contributed by Lukas
With the season behind us, Rebecca Greenfield and Jackie Simmons sat down during the Bloomberg Businessweek conference to go inside the making of The ...
Moving Forward by Looking Back
29 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For our final episode of season 3, we take a look at how reckoning with our history, collectively, and personally, can help us move forward. Closing t...
Reparations Gone Wrong
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Reparations for slavery in the U.S. aren't happening any time soon. But there are other countries that have compensated populations for persecution. T...
A Reparations Experiment
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This week on the Pay Check, we look at the long fight for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Economists have calculated that each Black American is o...
The Problem With Affirmative Action
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
For the last few weeks, we've talked about the origins of the racial wealth gap. This week, we're turning our attention to one of the first major effo...
The Black Homeownership Tax
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Homeownership has been a main source of intergenerational wealth in the U.S. But it’s one that is out of reach for many Black Americans. Decades aft...
A Quick Note From The Pay Check
29 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Pay Check team has a request for our listeners. Experts estimate closing the racial wealth gap would cost around $13 trillion. That amounts to aro...
'The Last Plantation'
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The top five White landowners in the U.S. own more land than all the Black landowners combined. And over the last century, Black farmers have lost nea...
The Unrelenting Cost of Slavery
18 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This week, we look at the 400 years of U.S. history that help explain today's racial wealth gap. Bloomberg economics reporter Catarina Saraiva takes c...
Introducing: Doubt
15 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A few decades ago, nobody really questioned vaccines. They were viewed as a standard part of staying healthy and safe. Today, the number of people que...
An Asset Becomes a Liability
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the season three premiere of The Pay Check, we're switching gears. For the next eight weeks, we'll be looking at the racial wealth gap in the U.S. ...
Coming Soon: The Pay Check Season 3
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
More than 150 years after the end of slavery in the U.S., the net worth of a typical white family is nearly six times greater than that of the average...
Introducing: Blood River, A New Podcast From Bloomberg
16 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The killers of Berta Caceres had every reason to believe they’d get away with murder. More than 100 other environmental activists in Honduras had be...
Introducing Foundering
25 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Adam Neumann had a vision: to make his startup WeWork a wildly successful company that would change the world. He convinced thousands of other people ...
Announcing Prognosis Daily: Coronavirus
25 Mar 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Harnessing Bloomberg's reporting from every continent, Bloomberg's daily Prognosis podcast brings the news, data and analysis you need for living in t...
Introducing Prognosis Season 4: America's Broken Health-Care Costs
15 Jan 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Americans are paying more and getting less for their health care than ever before. On the new season of Prognosis, reporter John Tozzi explores what w...
Coming Soon: Travel Genius Season 2
30 Oct 2019
Contributed by Lukas
Bloomberg's Travel Genius podcast is back! After clocking another hundred-thousand miles in the sky, hosts Nikki Ekstein and Mark Ellwood have a whole...
Introducing Prognosis Season 3: Superbugs
26 Aug 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On this new season of Prognosis, we look at the spread of infections that are resistant to antimicrobial medicines. You're probably more likely to hav...
Live From London: Equal Pay for Equal Play
22 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Pay Check is back with a bonus episode on gender equality in women’s soccer. A few months ago, the US women’s soccer team filed a pay discrimi...
Help Wanted
15 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
During World War II, the influx of women workers into the workforce solved one problem—the labor shortage—while creating another: Who would watch ...
The No-Child Policy
08 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
For the last few weeks, we’ve been talking about how having kids makes it hard for women to work for pay. But there’s a flip side to that: Because...
Introducing: Business of Bees
07 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
These days about one in three bites of food you eat wouldn’t be possible without commercial bee pollination. And the economic value of insect pollin...
What About Dads?
01 May 2019
Contributed by Lukas
When we talk about the gender pay gap, we’re talking about a ratio: how much women make compared to men. We’ve spent the last three weeks talking ...
The Bad Economics of Childcare
24 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
We know working moms make less than men partly because they work fewer hours, and one of the main reasons for that is: childcare. Because, well: someo...
Introducing "What Goes Up," A New Show From Bloomberg
18 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On this new show from Bloomberg, hosts Mike Regan and Sarah Ponczek speak with expert guests each week about the main themes influencing global market...
The Pregnant Pause
17 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we begin at the beginning: with pregnancy. Women with kids get sidelined at work even before they arrive. From the moment a woman get...
The Motherhood Penalty
10 Apr 2019
Contributed by Lukas
In the season premier of The Pay Check, we take a close look at the single biggest reason for the gender pay gap: Motherhood. Women start out their ca...
Coming Soon: The Pay Check Season 2
27 Mar 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Pay Check is back for a second season! For the next six weeks, we’re going to dig into the number one reason women still make less money than me...
A Message from The Pay Check
07 Feb 2019
Contributed by Lukas
The Pay Check is collecting stories for our upcoming season, and we want to hear from you! Did having a kid change your career trajectory or the way y...
Introducing "Works For Me," A New Podcast From Bloomberg
09 Jan 2019
Contributed by Lukas
On this new show from Bloomberg, hosts Francesca Levy and Rebecca Greenfield navigate the productivity industry by way of their own experiences. In ea...
Travel Genius, a New Show From Bloomberg
08 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
What’s the most sure-fire way to get a flight upgrade? How can you find the best, secret local restaurants by asking just one question? What's the f...
Prognosis, a New Show From Bloomberg
02 Nov 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Where does a medical cure come from? 100 years ago, it wasn't uncommon for scientists to test medicines by taking a dose themselves. As medical techno...
'This is My Number'
05 Sep 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the third episode of the podcast’s conversation series, Michele Roberts, the first woman to head a major professional sports union in North Ameri...
'Why Aren't There More Women in Poker?'
29 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The Pay Check continues its conversations series. First, we hear from Annie Duke and Maria Konnikova about power dynamics and sexism in the ultra male...
‘Have you ever been sexually harassed?’
22 Aug 2018
Contributed by Lukas
After The Pay Check ended, conversations about the pay gap didn’t—so we decided to listen in. We went out and found some of the smartest women we ...
Get Yourself Paid
13 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
So far, the pay gap has proved pretty impossible to solve. But most of us aren’t just going to sit here and accept that we’ll be paid less than me...
Treating the Disease
06 Jun 2018
Contributed by Lukas
The pay gap goes way deeper than just men's and women's salaries—that's why just paying women more doesn't solve the problem. In this episode, Clair...
The Shaming Initiative
30 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Can companies be shamed into closing the pay gap? A new law in the U.K. requires companies with more than 250 employees to publicly disclose their gen...
The Gray Areas
23 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
Skeptics say the gender pay gap is explained by choices women make about family and career. Rebecca Greenfield unpacks those arguments with the help o...
Let's Talk About a Sex Scandal
16 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
There was a brief moment 150 years ago when it looked like women might get equal pay for equal work. But they didn’t—and that set the standard for...
A Big, Expensive, Global Mystery
09 May 2018
Contributed by Lukas
In the first episode of The Pay Check, we go deep on pay discrimination. Host Rebecca Greenfield tells us about an equal pay fight in her own family. ...
Coming Soon: The Pay Check
26 Apr 2018
Contributed by Lukas
It’s a big, expensive, global mystery. Why do women still make less money—a lot less—than men? In the US, the average woman makes 80 cents to ev...