Every year at women’s day various companies and firms portray and promote gender equality through their social media platforms. However, whether or not they practice what they preach is another debate, especially when it comes to the wage gap.
This year, a Twitter-based gender pay gap bot decided to put an end to this hypocrisy, by openly calling out some empty corporate celebrations of International Women’s Day. The anonymous Gender Pay Gap Bot terrorized many British employers by quote-tweeting their International Women Day posts with the company’s gender pay gap data. So far, this anonymous AI has gone after a number of companies from political parties, pub chains, universities, local councils, charities to fashion brands, and whatnot.
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 that have emerged so far is the pub chain Young’s, which has a shocking wage gap of 73 percent, as well as the fashion brand, Missguided, which pays women an average of 40 percent less per hour than their male employees. While Ryanair, which had put out a movie-style poster celebrating its female staff members, has a wage gap of an appalling 68 percent.
Happy International Womens' Day!👑
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
— Missguided (@Missguided) March 8, 2022
After being called out by the bot, some companies chose to delete their tweets altogether to save face from any approaching criticism. As in the case of Aston University, where the average hourly pay for female employees is 25.8 percent less than the male employees. After the deletion of their tweet, one Twitter user noted “My alma mater does not like being faced with reality”. Another user’s thread collating all the deletions has already reached over 2,300 retweets.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot is highlighting the organizations that are simply paying lip service to equality rather than implementing much-needed meaningful practices. If we wish to create workspaces without any gender disparity, that promote diversity and inclusion, we need to break down barriers for women working in digital marketing, engineering and academic workspaces and give them their due share.
