Every year on Women’s Day, various companies and firms use their social media platforms to portray and promote gender equality. However, whether or not they practice what they preach is a different matter, particularly when it comes to the wage disparity.
This year, a Twitter-based gender pay gap bot decided to call out some empty corporate celebrations of International Women’s Day, putting an end to this hypocrisy.
Many British employers were terrorized by the anonymous Gender Pay Gap Bot, which quote-tweeted their International Women’s Day posts with the company’s gender pay gap data.
So far, this anonymous AI has targeted a variety of businesses, including political parties, pub chains, universities, local councils, charities, and fashion brands.
The bar chain Young’s, which has a frightening wage disparity of 73 percent, as well as the fashion business Missguided, which pays women 40 percent less per hour than their male employees, are among the worst incidents that have emerged thus far.
While Ryanair, which celebrated its female employees with a movie-style billboard, has a staggering 68 percent wage disparity.
Some businesses elected to remove their tweets entirely after being called out by the bot, in order to avoid more criticism.
As in the example of Aston University, where female employees earn 25.8% less than male employees on an hourly basis.
After the deletion of their tweet, one Twitter user noted “My alma mater does not like being faced with reality”. A thread containing all of the deletions has already received over 2,300 retweets.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot is identifying companies that are only saying they care about equality but aren’t actually doing anything about it.
We need to break down obstacles for women working in digital marketing, engineering, and academic workspaces and give them their fair share if we want to create workplaces that are free of gender disparities and encourage diversity and inclusion.
To read our blog on “PTA has signed a reducing gender gap agreement with GSM Association,” click here.