Twitter Bot Trolls Organizations For Hypocrisy On International Women’s Day

A Twitter bot has been causing reputational chaos for hundreds of British organizations by highlighting hypocrisy about the gender pay gap.

As companies fell over themselves yesterday to tweet in support of International Women’s Day, the Gender Pay Gap bot retweeted them – adding the figure for each one’s gender pay gap in terms of average hourly pay.

The bot was created by copywriter Francesca Lawson and software developer Ali Fensome with the strapline “Deeds not words. Stop posting platitudes. Start fixing the problem”.

The figures are available thanks to 2017 legislation requiring organizations with more than 250 employees to publish them annually.

In some cases, the disparity is appalling. The government’s innovation agency Innovate UK, for example, has a pay gap of 36 per cent, while at low-cost airline Ryanair it’s 68.6 per cent. At women’s clothing retailer Missguided, meanwhile, the figure is 40 per cent and at Young’s Pubs it’s an astonishing 73.2 per cent.

Many public sector organizations have also been shamed. The Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust has a gender pay gap of 19.5 per cent, while the figure is 16.8 per cent for the Treasury, 14.4 for Humberside Police and 8.8 per cent for Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

Many of the companies’ tweets are toe-curlingly inappropriate – some feature only pictures of men, for example, while others present women in sterotypical roles. The London Dungeon, for some reason, decided to use the day to suggest that Jack the Ripper might have been a woman, and to highlight female murderers.

Many organizations reacted with panic after seeing the bot’s retweets. Some, such as Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust, blocked replies. Others, including Innovate UK, Aston University, Hitachi Solutions Europe, St Peter’s School in York and HMRC deleted their tweets, in some cases reposting later with different hashtags. The Gender Pay Bot retweeted them again, all the same.

However, some come out of the retweets rather well. At broadband form Hyperoptic, for example, women are paid 55.8 per cent more than men, while at the Vagina Museum the gender pay gap is unreportable, as all its staff are female.

The requirement for gender pay gap reporting exists in a number of countries, with Ireland announcing plans just yesterday to introduce a similar scheme to the UK’s. In some countries, though, the threshold for reporting is much lower, with Sweden mandating it for companies with as few as 10 staff.