Global Comment

Worldwide voices on arts and culture

The bot that saved International Women’s Day from pinkwashing

Three women

When you’re a journalist, days dedicated to causes tend to be spent fending off an influx of irrelevant press releases. So overwhelming is the number that it can actually take the shine off them; even those days that you would otherwise be celebrating.

Take International Women’s Day for instance, for that is today. In theory it’s a day of feminist activism, fighting for change and supporting the women in your life. In practice, every brand under the sun thinks that, in honour of the day, I want to write about their skin products or quote – and I’m not joking, many times over – someone called Dave or Clive or Steve.

Rather like the rainbow-washing of Pride month, International Women’s Day risks being about shopping and manicures rather than violence against women or abortion rights or equal pay.

Thankfully, a bot has come to the rescue, the hero we didn’t know we needed but we did. For the last few years, the Gender Pay Gap Bot has made my International Women’s Day feel meaningful again. It’s a simple idea but sometimes simplicity is exactly what we need to get the point across.

In the UK, organisations with more than 250 members of staff must report their gender pay gap to the government every year.

So on International Women’s Day, whenever an organisation tweets about International Women’s Day, the Gender Pay Gap Bot retweets it with their latest gender pay gap statistics.

It is beautifully effective. Nothing highlights empty platitudes like concrete evidence, right above them, presenting at least some degree of contradiction.

Some organisations turn out to be under a “Could be improved, but not doing too badly” category, such as Birmingham City Council, where women are paid 4.7% less than men.

Others, such as Space NK, come under a “Yikes, that’s really bad” category. Because even when they highlight their female founders,, women’s hourly pay being 29.3% less than men’s is pretty inexcusable. .

There’s the occasional moment where women and men are paid the same, such as at United Response.

And on rare occasions when women even earn (usually ever-so-slightly) more than their male colleagues, such as at Magenta Living.

But I’ve left the best (worst) til the last, which is the category I have named “Absolutely Egregious”, and this is where the dirty delete often comes into play, as we can see here at Pontefract Academy Trust, where women’s pay is 50% lower than men’s.

And at Bridge Academy Trust, where women’s median hourly pay is 57.2% lower than men’s.

But the stats speak for themselves. They can delete their tweets, which were presumably celebrating women, but the evidence is out there for anybody to see. And the Gender Pay Gap Bot helps us to see the hypocrisy.

Because while anybody can search the database to find out how any organisation is doing, the fact is that few of us do. But when the tweets fly by, and they get traction, there’s nowhere to hide.

I have an insider tip for any organisation embarrassed to find that they have been publicly humiliated by a bot

But I have an insider tip for any organisation embarrassed to find that they have been publicly humiliated by a bot with 242,000 followers: pay women equally. And fix your disability pay gap, your ethnicity pay gap, and all of the pay gaps.

By next International Women’s Day, you can tweet your happy quotes and photos of admirable women free of fear.

And if you send me a press release entitled “How I turned my company round from a 57% gender pay gap to 100% equal pay”, I might actually write about it.

Image: Becca Tapert

 

Related posts:

  1. Who gets to #BeBold on International Women’s Day?
  2. Doing it for Themselves: Connecting Girls on International Women’s Day
  3. Gender-neutral performance awards at the Berlin International Film Festival