Companies scramble after being called out by gender pay gap bot
A Twitter account exposing the gender pay gap at companies tweeting about International Women’s Day has caused a stir, prompting several of those companies to delete their posts.
The account, appropriately called the Gender Pay Gap Bot, has seemed to take the internet by storm after it was first started in March 2021.
Using data from the UK government’s gender pay gap service website, the account retweets posts from British companies with the median hourly pay difference between male and female employees.
For example, fashion house Missguided tweeted: “Happy International Women’s Day! We’re paying it forward this IWD, and we’re giving away prizes throughout the day, including x2 lots of £1000 CASH.
“To win, tweet us using #PayItForwardWithMissguided and share the best piece of advice you’ve received.”
The Gender Pay Gap Bot replied with, “In this organisation women’s median hourly pay is 40 percent lower than men’s”.
For a majority of companies, the bot has actually reported that women’s pay was higher than men’s, including West London NHS Trust, Rowans Hospice and The Landmark Trust, and that St John’s Ambulance employees were paid equally.
However, some of the companies where women earn less than men have scrambled to delete their tweets after they were called out by the bot.
The creators of the bot, Manchester-based copywriter Francesca Lawson and software developer Alastair Fensome, told Quartz they made it to put the spotlight on companies and ensure their empowering words matched their actions.
“[We] built it to put the gender pay gap data in the spotlight and enable the public to hold companies to account over the words of ‘empowerment’, ‘inspiration’ and ‘celebration’ they tweet on International Women’s Day,” Lawson explained via email.
“The data shows their supportive posts are rarely backed up by action.”
Image: @PayGapApp (Twitter)