About Us

moirée — the name comes from the optical moire effect: when two fine grids are overlaid, new patterns suddenly emerge that were invisible in either individual image.

You know the effect: a finely striped shirt shimmers on television, two window grilles overlap, you hold two sieves against each other — and waves and circles appear that were not there before.

That is what happens on this platform. On one side: lived experiences from working life. On the other: academic studies documenting structural disadvantage. Only laid over each other do they show patterns that stay invisible in either one alone. That is moirée.

“I've never seen a woman in my industry being disadvantaged. We're all always very supportive!” — said by a flatmate, 2026. No ill will, no intent to play anything down: an honest perception from a vantage point where these patterns stay invisible. The obvious answer would have been: show the data. But which data?

The research turned up a gap. EU reports from EPRA and Creative Europe are static PDFs: valuable, but not searchable, not filterable, not broken down to individual cases. US sources such as the UCLA Hollywood Reports give annual statistics, but no individual experiences. In the D/A/CH region, networks like Digital Media Women run events and mentoring — but no databases. Nobody collects anonymised individual cases and makes them searchable, filterable and citable.

This gap is no accident. Individual experiences of professional disadvantage are hard to capture: subjective, often subtle, and those affected have good reasons not to speak about them publicly. That is why it takes an infrastructure that protects anonymity and is still citable.

moiree.eu is the answer to that: a platform that makes invisible patterns of professional disadvantage visible and citable — so that “I've never seen anything like that” can be answered with structured, anonymised, searchable data. Started in the D/A/CH region, it is growing across Europe step by step.

The core team is currently being built. moiree.eu was initiated by the founders of moirée and is looking for collaborators from sociology, data science, UX design and employment law.

We are particularly looking for:

• Researchers — with experience in qualitative social research, gender studies, or labor market research
• Developers — for frontend, data visualization, and accessible web development
• Legal experts — with expertise in labor law, anti-discrimination law, or data protection law (DACH + EU)
• Advisory board members — from academia, civil society, and the creative industries for the interdisciplinary scientific advisory board

If you are interested in contributing, please use the contact form further down on this page.

moiree.eu pursues one goal: making invisible patterns of professional disadvantage visible and citable — not as a one-off report, but as a growing data infrastructure that is open, transparent and academically grounded. The vision: a Europe-wide platform where each country runs its own chapter — locally coordinated, culturally adapted, connected by shared methodology and data architecture.

The entire project is Open Source:

• Source code under MIT License — freely available, modifiable, and reusable
• Data and content under Creative Commons CC BY 4.0 — freely usable with attribution

Why Open Source? Three reasons that also form the foundations of this project's eligibility for funding:

• Reproducibility: The entire codebase is forkable. An organization in France, Sweden, or Brazil can adopt the infrastructure and adapt it to their own context. No vendor lock-in, no dependency on a single team.
• Transparency: The methodology is publicly documented, the category definitions are academically grounded, and the limitations are clearly stated. Scientific credibility comes from traceability, not authority.
• Incrementality: moiree.eu is a living resource, not a one-time report. The database grows with every submission, the analysis becomes more precise with every new case.

You can find the complete source code on GitHub: github.com/moiree-eu

The platform's purple combines 51% pink — for the 51% of women in the world population — and 49% blue — for the 49% of men: color as a political statement.

Brand and Assets

The moirée logo is text-based: moirée (moiree.eu), rendered as styled HTML text. There is no separate image file.

Primary color (accent): Purple #7A5AB5 (CSS variable: --primary) — used for statistics, highlights, and data visualizations.

Color palette: The design uses a muted, scientific color scheme with Purple (#7A5AB5) as the primary color, Teal (#2CA882), Coral (#D85A30), and Blue (#3B8AD4) as secondary colors. Light and dark modes are automatically supported.

Fonts: The project uses exclusively self-hosted open-source fonts — Playfair Display (headings), IBM Plex Mono (data and code), and Source Serif 4 (body text on editorial pages).

Journalists, NGOs and researchers will find key figures, citable graphics and contact details on the press page.

Would you like to contribute, use the data, or have questions about the project? We look forward to hearing from you.