Every year on International Women’s Day, a number of businesses and organisations use their social media channels to highlight and support gender equality. However, whether they practise what they preach is a another matter, especially when it comes to pay disparities.
To put an end to the hypocrisy, a Twitter-based gender pay gap bot chose to call out certain vacuous corporate celebrations of International Women’s Day this year.
The mystery Gender Pay Gap Bot, who quote-tweeted their International Women’s Day postings with the company’s gender pay gap data, startled many British companies. Political parties, bar chains, universities, local governments, charities, and fashion corporations have all been attacked by this nameless AI so far.
In this organisation, women's median hourly pay is 37% lower than men's. https://t.co/ZbCVRKW5Dx
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2022
Among the worst cases to date are the pub chain Young’s, which has a shocking wage difference of 73 percent, and the fashion company Missguided, which pays women 40 percent less per hour than their male employees. Ryanair, on the other hand, has a shocking 68 percent compensation discrepancy, as evidenced by a movie-style billboard honouring its female employees.
Happy International Womens' Day!👑
— Missguided (@Missguided) March 8, 2022
We're paying it forward this IWD, and we're giving away prizes throughout the day, including x2 lots of £1,000 CASH💘
To win, tweet us using #PayItForwardWithMissguided and share the best piece of advice you've received✨
T&C's apply
After being called out by the bot, some businesses chose to erase their tweets entirely in order to prevent more criticism. As an example, female employees at Aston University earn 25.8% less than male employees on an hourly basis.
After their comment was deleted, one Twitter user wrote, “My alma mater does not appreciate being confronted with reality.” Over 2,300 people have retweeted a thread containing all of the deletions.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot identifies businesses that claim to care about gender equality but don’t actually do anything about it.
If we want to establish workplaces that are free of gender imbalances and support diversity and inclusion, we must remove barriers for women working in digital marketing, engineering, and academic settings and give them their due share.