A Twitter bot is calling out companies that posted on International Women’s day for their own gender pay gap, calling out the obvious hypocrisy.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot went viral on Tuesday when it took aim at a number of companies celebrating International Women’s Day on Twitter by exposing that they were paying their female employees less than their male employees.
Behind the bot are copywriter Francesca Lawson and software developer Ali Fensome, both from Manchester, England and both 27 years of age. Their bot utilizes publicly available data to that identified British companies and organizations tweeting, with the International Women’s Day #hashtag, and would retweet them with information about their own gender pay gaps.
Some deleted the tweets.
“I think it’s pretty cowardly to delete the tweet after being called out — it gives off the impression that they’re embarrassed about their pay gap and they’d rather pretend it doesn’t exist than own up to their problems and do something about it,” Lawson said, according to CNET. “Nationwide Building Society and University of Sunderland responded with a bit more context about what is causing their gap, which I think is a much more helpful response.”
