Beware the gender pay gap bot
The bot that calls out Twitter corporate virtue signalling with hard data
Readers who don't spend a great deal of time on Twitter may have missed out on one of the more pithy elements of International Women's Day yesterday - the Gender Pay Gap Bot.
The bot is the work of freelance copywriter Francesca Lawson and developer Ali Fensome, and is brutally effective in its demolition of corporate marketing teams using International Women's Day as nothing more than a marketing message.
The bot does two things. Firstly, any company tweeting using the main IWD hashtags has it's tweet retweeted with its pay gap data attached where that data is available. The reply shows the % difference in hourly median pay and also whether the gap has increased or decreased in the last year. A glance through the feed shows that the original tweeter often deletes their tweet after the bot has done it's work.
Useful for those interested in tech employers is that the bot also publishes data on the difference in annual bonus payments. The data suggests that some of the world's largest and best known tech companies still report a significant gender pay gap.
Secondly, any Twitter user can ask the bot for data on a specific company. The bot pulls all its data from the publicly available Gender Pay Gap service.
Lawson's self-stated aim is not to prevent companies talking about International Women's Day but to encourage firms to be honest and accountable rather than relying on platitudes about empowerment and equity. The ultimate measure of how much a company values its women employees is how much it pays them.
LinkedIn was a sea of IWD imagery yesterday and there must have been an enormous spike in the use of the words "inspirational," "empowerment," and "equity." But words are just that, and plenty of tech companies are failing at the ultimate way of empowering women, which is to pay them as they would the men who work for them.
As Lawson said yesterday to the BBC:
If I'm that inspirational then pay me properly."
As the bot showed time and time again yesterday, tech retains a gender pay gap. Indeed, data published today by the recruitment platform 50inTech shows that the unadjusted pay gap for UK Tech start-ups comes in at 26%, making British women working in tech the most underpaid in Europe, in comparison with their male peers.
In an interview with Computing earlier this month, Sophie Creese, Motherboard Founder and Manager of London Tech at the recruiter ADLIB, shared examples of women software developers being significantly under offered for jobs they were well qualified for, women being told that they needed upskilling for a job to justify a lower pay bracket when test results demonstrated otherwise, and of women being told that they had to make presentations to win certain promotions when their male peers were not asked to do likewise.
The bot is still highly active on Twitter, calling out empty corporate virtue signalling every few seconds. Lawson's own Twitter feed is a comparison of how companies tweeted on IWD 22 and 23.
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