In honor of International Women’s Day (IWD) being this week, businesses took the time to express their support for women’s equality through various social media posts.
However, the corporate world’s virtue signaling lacks real action and accountability, which led to the creation of the Gender Pay Gap Bot on Twitter, which shines a light on those companies lagging in real policy that supports women.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot has been quote-tweeting organizations sharing performative IWD posts and revealing the company’s gender pay gap data.
The pay discrepancies between men and women’s median hourly earnings were as much as 40% in some cases, while London-based pub chain Young’s Pub paid women a staggering 73.2% less than men.
Many of these companies have deleted their IWD posts after their pay gap was disclosed in order to avoid criticism, but the damage to their reputation has been done.
Around five years ago, the UK government began requiring companies with over 250 employees to share their pay discrepancies between men and women.
Freelance copywriter and social media manager Francesca Lawson and software developer Ali Fensome compiled this data and created a code that seeks out specific keywords related to IWD to see if there is a match to the government’s database.
“If we’re not confronting that data and acting on it, then the problems are just going to persist forever,” said Lawson. “We created the bot to make sure that this data isn’t just forgotten about – it’s in the spotlight. By talking about it, we can begin to put pressure on employers to start changing their hiring practices, and paying everyone more.”
