By Katy Howell | March 10, 2022
It’s quite common for brands and organisations to bring their A-game on social media to celebrate and support International Women’s Day with heartwarming messages and campaigns. However, this year, a Twitter bot was responsible for exposing the salary gap that exists within organisations that claim to support women and gender equality. And believe us, that was SOMETHING! Here at IF, we had to get the popcorn out and follow the whole thing up because… Oh my… the hypocrisy! 😱
Basically, Francesca Lawson and software developer Ali Fensome built the account Gender Pay Gap Bot as a bot, writing a code that identifies British organisations tweeting with the International Women’s Day hashtag and would retweet them with information about their gender pay gaps. As it says in @paygapapp Twitter bio: “Employers, if you tweet about International Women’s Day, I’ll retweet your gender pay gap 👀”… EPIC!
Here are some examples – enjoy 😉:
Obviously, this went viral very quickly and by the end of the day, @thepaygapapp had more than 200K followers. And, of course, some companies got scared and went into panic mood. Aware that the bot was going to bring to light those organisations with gender pay gaps, many companies deleted their original International Women’s Day tweets so they wouldn’t show up in the Bot’s feed. LOL.
The fact that this went viral clearly means that consumers are demanding more transparency from companies who, ironically, create campaigns against inequality. Well, thanks to this bot, now some companies have been completely found out and consumers got some answers! And believe us, consumers don’t forget! 👀