Twitter Largely Applauds As 'Gender Pay Gap Bot' Calls Out Brands Posting Puff Messages On International Women's Day
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Yesterday was International Women's Day, a day intended to celebrate the achievements of women in society, but as with similar events like Black History Month and Pride Month, the day saw social media largely filled with jokes and corporate lip-service. Many organizations put out branded content celebrating the women in their company, and while many rolled their eyes at some of the more transparent panderings, one Twitter account became the day's celebrity — a bot that reported on the gendered differences in the median pay of employees at every company that tweeted about International Women's Day.
Known as "Gender Pay Gap Bot," it was created last year by U.K. couple Francesca Lawson and Ali Fensome. The bot uses the publically available gender pay gap service website, at which a user can enter the name of a company and receive information about the disparity between the way the employees pay men and women. It went viral yesterday as it caught multiple companies tweeting about their appreciation of their female employees when they appear to pay women a lesser salary than their male counterparts.
It should be noted, however, that the bot itself doesn't tell the whole story of every organization, and some organizations stepped in to defend themselves. For example, the University of Sunderland responded to the bot by writing, "18.5% partly reflects the fact that there are some roles at the lower end of our pay structure, such as student ambassador, casual, domestic and administrative roles which tend to be predominantly filled by women."
The bot also highlighted some companies where women received equal or higher median pay than their male counterparts. Perusing the account now, one will find several quote-tweets that are missing the source tweet, presumably because the bot sparked a backlash against a company trying to show its appreciation for women.
At any rate, the account won the favor of Twitter users for the havoc it caused in calling out hollow corporate messaging and platitudes.
This is brilliant. If your employer tweets about #IWD2022, @PayGapApp will tweet the gender pay gap for that company. 😱 This is not going well for a LOT of firms https://t.co/rWNHUyxMf3
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 8, 2022
Gender Pay Gap bot is 🔥 @PayGapApp pic.twitter.com/WOEMi3tB3e
— Comrade RED (@comradarjun) March 9, 2022
It's an unfortunate fact that women are often paid less for the same job than their male counterparts, and even if the Gender Pay Gap bot doesn't directly influence change in that regard, at least it will discourage lip-service corporate posting online.
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MCC1701
I don't know which I hate more, the misconception of a "gender pay gap" or that it's still circulating and taken seriously in 2022. Not only is it a far more complex issue than you can sum up as a single statistic, but is highly misleading as most will interpret it as an earnings gap.
If you want to have a conversation as to why more women aren't in higher paying roles that's fine; I can tell you that women valuing flexibility over higher salary is a major reason but there are others that can be productively discussed and potentially addressed. This however only serves to obfuscate that discussion, which I'm sure big brands don't mind.
Out of curiosity, does anyone know if the bot responded to a company that had median wages favoring women rather than men? Odds are with all the companies putting out PR pieces on twitter at least a few fall into that category.
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
I agree that there are a lot of problems with trying to simplify an issue down to a single reason, as it seems to have been presented by many KYM viewers here. No modern subject in today's world can be simplified down to a single tweet or one 1500 character limit comments. There are a lot of nuances, which are explored heavily in various academic studies and non-partisan research groups. I feel that Sunderland University is an example of taking the statistic and expanding on one of their presumed reasons for it, but then it stopped short there. This is one of those discussions I feel needs to be dug into by asking "Why?" to whatever reason you find until you get to the root cause. This of course involves matching it with vetted studies, to see if your conclusion is consistent with heavily researched ones. All these things that I don't feel most people want to afford their time doing, making it easy to claim inaccurate things.
MCC1701
Fair observations, but I think the most important question to ask is "is there actually a problem?" Assuming no discrimination or harassment is at play and all factors being equal, a random distribution of employees across a company will present "gaps" in every demographic; race, age, gender, etc. A gap can serve as a symptom of an actual issue but isn't an issue itself. IE being tired is a symptom of being sick but there are many benign and natural reasons to be tired as well.
Now if you want to look at why men and women appear to gravitate towards certain jobs that's better, but again is only potentially a symptom of a problem rather than an issue in and of itself. For example, maybe airlines have a discrimination problem, which should be addressed if true. Or, anecdotally, women I know value travel, flexibility, customer-facing positions, etc. If this trend holds true to women at large or even just women in the airline industry then I could see it alone explaining the discrepancy; I don't see a fault if personal choice is the driving factor.
Excitebot theLEGO
My sister loves bringing up this video whenever the wage gap gets mentioned:
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
I'm seeing a lot of the same argument that the pay difference is because of how women are in lower paying roles than men. Assuming this is true, that opens up the larger problem as to WHY there is a disparity of women in higher paying professions. Like with the Blizzard fiasco, where women felt discouraged from going into a male-dominant role because of harassment. Or, the gender norms put onto women at a young age to pursue nurse roles instead of doctor positions, or become flight attendants instead of pilots.
Just Sayin'
Or, it's because women are simply hardwired fundamentally differently from men on a biological level, causing them to be less likely to seek out those higher paying positions if left entirely to their own devices. Gender norms aside, the evidence shows that women gravitate toward roles that are more nurturing (education, medicine). It's funny that you used the nurse/doctor example in your argument, because in most countries female doctors actually outnumber males. Medicine is a very female-dominated field.
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
Can you give me the evidence that a woman is biologically hardwired to pursue a different career? Talking about actual linked studies. Because that myth has been explored, and such studies conducted found there is no biological drive that causes one sex to pursue different kinds of jobs. (Messing)
Also, medicine is a female dominate field, but that doesn't mean it's dominated in the higher-payed positions. The statistic of physician roles are almost always male-dominated. The highest when females do take the majority--in European regions-- is 53%. (Boniol)Otherwise, females overwhelmingly dominated far less paid roles such as nurses.
Sources
https://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/handle/10665/311314/WHO-HIS-HWF-Gender-WP1-2019.1-eng.pdf
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2190/KK50-HCTC-9YHA-BUTA?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=ori:rid:crossref.org&rfr_dat=cr_pub%20%200pubmed
Nymanator
"It's an unfortunate fact that women are often paid less for the same job than their male counterparts."
The truth is more nuanced than that, Adam, in ways that even your shitty linked source fails to address. For example, if you control for factors like age cohorts, you see that young women are actually outearning young men. If you only look at certain parts of the information, then you only get certain parts of the truth.
H.UNgrammar
I hope there will be a black, lgbtq and patriotic versions to show how brands don't care about us!
lecorbak
Be aware that, obviously, it depends of what kind of jobs they are doing.
this number doesn't take into parameters that for example, in an air company, the ones doing the most technical jobs (like creating airplanes or piloting one) will be mostly done by men, and the rest of the less technical jobs will be mostly done by women.
if you want to compare salary, you need to compare them for the same job, not the same company, as a company can have different jobs.
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
I think that goes into a bigger problem on why there is a disparity of women in these other jobs. For example, the whole Blizzard fiasco where many women felt discouraged from going into a very male-dominant role due to the harassment of their colleagues.
lecorbak
or maybe that's just that women are less interested in aviation than men.
you know, most jobs are favored by either men or women and this has nothing to do with women being refused to those jobs.
and personally, I prefer a disparity between men and women if that means employing the most qualified persons, not employing some random people just to please some random feminists on twitter.
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
Take it a step further, do you really think there is a male-driven reason for why there are more males in aviation than females? If so, why?
Statistically, flight attendants jobs are 75-85% more dominated by females. Male pilots make up 90% of the workforce and females make up 10%. Why do you feel that number is the way it is?
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Gumshoe
It's kind of funny but the fact it's just comparing median wages with no other information also means it really lacks nuance. Ryanair as an example has a particularly big pay gap, but even without looking into it I'd expect a lot of this has to do with the fact that women are seriously over-represented as flight attendants, while men are over-represented as pilots. Pilots are valuable because they have to undergo expensive training to do their job, and while flight attendants have to be trained too, it's not nearly to the same degree, so it's pretty much inevitable that an airline will have this gap.
You could interrogate this further and ask what is it that makes girls think from a young age that their place in aviation is to just be an attendant and not a pilot, or why men think being an attendant isn't a job for them, but that's a much broader societal thing and it's not really Ryanair's fault that not many women want to be pilots, and that not many men want to be flight attendants.
ObadiahtheSlim
Learning to fly a plane is expensive. Most commercial pilots are former military pilots because the military will pay for it all. Many women can't meet the minimum physical requirements and therefore don't even have a chance to go the free military route. So already, with no malice, there is no way there will ever be parity.
IfYaDVote-ReplyToWhy
There are a lot of reasons why there are problems, that the airforce has publicly stated they wish to remedy. Right now the airforce is 20% dominated. The women who do leave have reported doing so out of feelings of harassment "One out of three uniformed women who responded said they had experienced sexual harassment during their careers."(Cohen).
Other such factors include the lack of family support(i.e. Maternity leave, child care, etc;). Since many woman still have social pressures to act as the caretaker to the child, they often feel they are left feeling they either can have a career in the military or raise a family. Others factors include a lack of representation seen in this branch and lack of diversity training programs. Which may explain why females have the highest participation in this military branch than others, since they worked heavily to address these complaints. Causing a rise of female members.
Source
https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2021/09/09/air-force-finds-hurdles-to-success-for-women-hispanics-other-minorities-in-second-disparity-review/
greenhowie
This is funny as fuck and yall here trying to make serious arguments. Nobody fucking cares what you think on knowyourmeme grow up and take the piss more
lecorbak
then why are you even posting here ?
Soxar
the fact that the bot info comes from all wages people get in a company and not the ones they get for the same job makes it pretty much useless, like lower end jobs having less pay is not news.
I mean the bot behavior was pretty funny in a kinda of "this you?" way but with that kind of info it's more destructive than constructive
0000000000000x0as3
Good, virtue signaling corporations need to be destroyed.
HJOF
I'm not american, so I am not sure about your business deals.
But if it is real, why would anyone hire men if you could hire a cheaper option?
It seems more to me like twitter being twitter.
Gumshoe
This is an extremely simplistic way of viewing labour. It's not that anyone has to conciously think "I could get the same work done for less by hiring a woman", it's that women's labour is systematically valued less than men's, including by women. If you could buy a new Toyota Corolla for $10k, or a new Mercedes S Class for $12k, you'd probably go for the Mercedes. It's a bit more expensive, but it's much more valuable. You probably won't just say "well the Corolla costs less so I would never choose to pay anything more for the Mercedes".
Ladara
Companies only care about profit. If employing women mean they earn more profit, companies will do it.