Photo via @PayGapApp/Twitter
March 8, 2022, 12:23 pm
Today is International Women’s Day—a global day to celebrate the cultural, political, and socioeconomic achievements of women everywhere because we’re awesome. It’s also a day often used to point out the fact that women are often not treated as awesome as we are, with sexism still infecting every nation on Earth in some form, including the ever-stubborn pay gap caused by companies failing time and time again to pay their employees equally across genders.
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This problem, as always, gets worse if you’re a woman of color.
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One Twitter account is addressing this persistent problem in a rather direct manner. Some amazing individual created a bot that detects companies and other employers who are tweeting platitudes about International Women’s Day. It then uses a gender pay gap database to find out exactly how much more men in the company or organization are paid than women and post that rate in a quote tweet for the whole internet to see.
The bot mostly appears to target employers base in the U.K., but has also caught plenty of U.S. and international employers being hypocrites who are all talk.
Many of the organizations getting pinged by the Gender Pay Gap Bot appear to have gaps that outperform the averages often stated by studies on the problem. Depending on the study, the gap (without factoring in race or other marginalizing factors) hovers around 77 to 84 cents for every dollar a man has paid and has hardly budged for decades no matter how many hashtags companies post.
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The issue continues to exacerbate poverty rates among women, particularly single mothers. While some have dismissed the pay gap as simply the result of women “choosing” to have children, this bizarrely ignores the fact that men also choose to have children and are fully capable of caring for them as well as women are, yet men tend to be paid more, not less, when they’re fathers. This includes when men are divorced and, by definition, single fathers, yet people don’t tend to call them that or use it in a derisive manner.
Regardless, the only true way for the pay gap to disappear (as long as we’re still going along with this whole capitalism thing) is for employers to put more effort into paying their female employees as much as their male ones than they do on their once-per-year Women’s Day tweets. The good news is that some are doing just that, and so some of the Gender Pay Gap Bot tweets look like this:
Or even this:
By hands down, no contest, our favorite Gander Pay Gap Bot posts look like this:
*First Published: March 8, 2022, 12:23 pm
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