Twitterbot exposes pay gap in companies tweeting about International Women’s Day

Twitter account @paygapapp exposed corporate hypocrisy on International Women’s Day on Tuesday. The robot responded to social media posts from British companies celebrating International Women’s Day with an automatic response showing the size of the wage gap between women and men who work in those companies. It turns out that a large portion of the companies that posted on International Women’s Day suffer from a pay gap.

The app, created by freelance copywriter Francesca Lawson and software developer Alastair Fensome, takes its data from a British government database. Organizations with more than 250 employees are required to calculate and release the pay difference between men and women within their company. The bot also publishes data on companies where women earn more than men, and does not distinguish between commercial companies and non-profit organizations.

† Why the wage gap is barely closing: ‘Many poor workers are employed by poor women’

The makers of the app particularly wanted to expose the empty words and hypocrisy of the published companies to present themselves in a positive light. “We created the app to highlight pay gap data and enable the public to hold companies accountable for the use of words like”Empowerment‘ And the ‘InspirationalLawson explains in an email to quartz† “The data shows that their supportive posts are rarely supported by actions.”

Lawson hopes companies will spend less time crafting external messages and more time doing what they can do in their own business. I want employers to stop treating International Women’s Day like a Hallmark holiday† And I want them to start taking responsibility for the inequality in their organizations.”

Also in Belgium, men still earn more on average than women. In 2020, women earned an average of 5.3 percent less per hour than men. The higher the age, the greater the wage gap: in the 25-34 age group, the difference is 3.4 percent, and in the 55-64 age group it rises to 8.9 percent.