Ah yes, International Women’s Day. The time when businesses scramble to advertise their feminist credentials, often without doing the work for the other 364 days of the year. Like Black History Month and LGBTQ+ Pride, it’s a popular holiday for corporate hypocrites.
Over on Twitter, a simple but clever bot is highlighting this kind of hypocrisy. Using statistics from the U.K. government’s registry of gender pay gap data, it gives accurate updates on whether certain businesses offer men and women equal pay. And it specifically targets companies that are tweeting about International Women’s Day.
Unsurprisingly, this bot is exposing a lot of businesses that maintain a significant pay gap between men and women, ranging from soccer teams to local police forces to branches of Oxford University. But since the bot is automated, it doesn’t discriminate. Some businesses do offer equal pay—or even pay their female employees more on average. For instance, this town council shows a reversal of the typical pay gap:
On the whole though, this bot just illustrates how the gender pay gap continues to thrive. While all these verified Twitter accounts praise their female employees and celebrate International Women’s Day, the stats speak for themselves. You probably won’t be surprised to learn that a lot of @PayGapApp’s targets responded by simply deleting their original tweets.
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