Twitter bot trolling companies tweeting about International Women’s Day is back

The Twitter bot that went viral last year for cleverly calling out companies about their gender pay gap on International Women’s Day is back at it.

International Women’s Day is celebrated every year to mark the cultural, economic, social and political achievements of women across the world.

Many companies use social media to highlight the achievements of the women working for them, or to raise awareness of the challenges facing women in the workplace generally.

However, several companies engage in mere lip service when it comes to fairly paying the women in their workforce.

The Gender Pay Gap Bot, created by Francesca Lawson, challenges companies that tweet about International Women’s Day, with the state of their gender pay gap.

Not surprisingly, the stats revealed that many organisations fall short by paying men more than women, according to median hourly pay.

‘If you tweet about #IWD2023, I’ll retweet your gender pay gap’ says the bot’s Twitter bio.

You can also tweet ‘@paygapapp pay gap for (company name)’ to get a reply with an employer’s pay gap stats.

Following last year’s success, the account has over 200 thousand followers waiting to see which organisations are failing women.

The bot uses the Government’s gender pay gap search tool to compare the pay of women to men. The tool looks at the median hourly pay of what women earn for every £1 men earn.

‘The gender pay gap is a comparison of men’s/women’s average pay across the organisation, not a comparison of pay for equivalent roles. But a gender pay gap often indicates a gender bias in the roles men and women do, and that’s a problem in itself,’ tweeted the account.

This year it comes with an added feature: year-on-year change. Where the Gender Pay Gap Service has data for two consecutive years, the quote tweet will now display how much the gap has changed. So you can see who’s making progress, and who’s letting the gap widen.

Many organisations even ended up deleting their tweets moments after being called out including NatWest, Virgin Atlantic, Aberystwyth University, Exeter City Council etc.

However, the bot also revealed who was doing better by paying men and women equally like South Kesteven District Council, Hackney Council and the English National Opera.

And some places even paid women more than men like the British Museum, Trinity College, Innocent Drinks, Evening Standard and Girlguiding.