Some celebrate International Women’s Day by doing something out of the ordinary: men will often gift flowers or show more attention to women. Some countries have even declared March 8th an official holiday, so being able to sleep in is also a way to honor the day.
Others will try to remind everyone what is the real significance of this day, talk about its history and highlight the problems that are still relevant. An unusual reminder of the pay gap is a bot on Twitter that responds to tweets by companies congratulating women on this day with statistics on what is the pay gap there.
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A couple from Manchester created a Twitter bot that responds to companies' posts about International Women's Day with data about their pay gap
Image credits: Molly Adams
The Twitter account is called Gender Pay Gap Bot and although it was created only last year, it already has 165k followers. The bio says “Employers, if you tweet about International Women's Day, I'll retweet your gender pay gap.”
The bot’s ‘parents’ are copywriter Francesca Lawson and software developer Ali Fensome from Manchester who created the bot in March last year. Ali Fensome went into more detail and told the Washington Post that the account scans Twitter for specific keywords and hashtags to find posts about Women’s day. Then it generates a quote retweet with the information about the pay gap.
Image credits: PayGapApp
The bot is programmed to search for keywords and hashtags and then quote retweet posts with information about pay gap from a database
Image credits: PayGapApp
The account got quite popular last year as the owners revealed that at first it only had just over 2,000 followers, however, this year they saw a huge jump in the numbers and by the end of the day of Tuesday, International Women’s Day, the account went viral and was sitting at 120k followers.
Bored Panda reached out to Francesca, one of the creators of the bot and asked what she thinks is the reason behind the account's success. She shared that "its popularity possibly lies in the simplicity of it - companies post vague messages of ‘empowerment’ and ‘celebration’, often in a quite emotive tone, and our bot just states the data in very matter-of-fact, neutral language. And all too often, the data doesn’t support their nice words! I think our tweets have helped open people’s eyes to the truth behind the corporate solidarity, enabling the public to better hold companies to account."
She told us that they with Ali never expected the bot to go viral and they were blown away by the response, but she is very glad that it did, because this project has a meaningful purpose, "To start the day on 2.4k followers and end on over 100k shows how valuable the gender pay gap data is - I’ve loved seeing people keep the pressure on companies to explain their gap and take action on it because of the data we’ve shared."
Image credits: PayGapApp
Image credits: PayGapApp
The couple created the bot to call out companies in the UK who pay women less compared to men and who despite this fact go to Twitter and talk about how they value their female employees.
The data is actually accessible for everyone as in the UK, companies with more than 250 employees must declare their gender pay gaps every year since 2017. According to the Office for National Statistics, the gender pay gap last year among all employees was 15.4 percent which means women earn about 85 percent of what men make.
Creators of this bot aimed to point out that most often women are the ones who get paid less and more people should be aware of this issue
Image credits: PayGapApp
Image credits: PayGapApp
We wanted to know if Francesca and Ali noticed some surprising comments from people, but actually it was the companies themselves that surprised the creators of the Gender Pay Gap Bot and not in a positive way. She revealed to us, " One surprising thing is that so few companies responded to us explaining their gender pay gap data and their action plan."
Francesca told us that they published over 1000 tweets this year, but only 3 companies (Nationwide Building Society, Luton Council and University of Sunderland) reacted and reached out to them. She adds, "Yes, their responses were still a bit vague, but at least they’re showing a willingness to acknowledge the data, and that’s the first step in actually doing something about it."
Image credits: PayGapApp
Also, it is very symbolic that the bot shares the data alongside with a message from organizations claiming how much they value their women employees
Image credits: PayGapApp
This trend of the page gap between men and women is seen all over the world and the biggest pay gap recorded in 2020 was in South Korea, reaching 31.5 percent. In the US, the number was 17.7 percent.
It is obvious that women are paid less than men even though they carry the same responsibilities, so it is ironic for organizations to tweet that they value their employees that are women when that doesn’t reflect in their wages.
Image credits: PayGapApp
Image credits: PayGapApp
Francesca confessed that she is thinking about doing more similar projects, "I’d love to be able to expand what we’ve done to cover the ethnicity pay gap too, but we’re a bit limited by the data that’s publicly available. The UK Government doesn’t require employers to report pay disparities around race in the same way that they do gender, but I think that’s something that needs to change. If that data becomes available, we’ll use it to make sure companies who publicly support Black History Month and Black Lives Matter events are actually doing the work behind the scenes."
It makes the congratulatory posts look really ironic and hypocritical
Image credits: PayGapApp
Even though the Gender Pay Gap Bot was created to bring to light the unfair pay between genders, there were some pleasant surprises as in some companies, the pay is equal. Some posts revealed that women were paid even more than men, which is also questionable.
There were posts by companies that were deleted and only the bot’s message of the pay gap remained. We can only assume what reactions people had causing the company accounts to delete the celebratory posts.
Image credits: PayGapApp
Even though most of the organizations paid women less, there were some nice revelations of them paying an equal wage to both genders
Image credits: PayGapApp
Image credits: PayGapApp
The general reaction to the bot was really positive because Twitter users felt that not enough people are aware of this reality and that the bot spreading data about various companies’ wages on social media where many internet users can see it will be one step further to solving the problem.
The gender pay gap is actually slowly decreasing, so it seems that various efforts are paying off, however, it is important to continue putting in that effort to not slow down the progress, especially when women get paid less depending on their skin color or what age they are.
Actually, Bored Panda made an article about how it seems that women have an ‘expiration date’ and are pushed from their workplaces at a certain age and are not hired anymore. You can read more about it here.
Surprisingly, there were companies that paid women more
Image credits: PayGapApp
Image credits: PayGapApp
What do you think of the Gender Pay Gap Bot? Did you find its responses amusing? What do you think about companies who pay women more? Do you think this is a reason to be happy about or it still is a pay gap? Let us know your thoughts and reactions in the comments!
People loved the idea of this bot and thought that companies must be called out for not paying their employees fair wages
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