International Women’s Day quickly turned from a PR opportunity to a corporate nightmare on Tuesday as firms felt the wrath of a Twitter ’bot.
The Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) had one simple premise: quote the tweets of companies and organisations mentioning IWD on Twitter and state their most recent gap between men and women’s salaries.
The result was a horrible exposure of what some would suggest is the hypocrisy of extolling the virtues of equality without actually practising it. Some companies hurriedly deleted their original tweets in shame, but arguably that only made it worse.
Dozens of organisations were targeted, including several law firms. Blake Morgan, Ashtons Legal, Browne Jacobson, DWF Law, White & Case, Mishcon de Reya and Shearman & Sterling featured, each having tweeted something in reference to IWD and each then shown to have at least a 20% median hourly pay gap between men and women.
Mishcon vigorously denied any suggestion of virtue signalling. 'We tweeted some statistics on female entrepreneurship,' a spokesperson said.
But whether fairly or unfairly some firms will have noticed a major increase in their social media profile yesterday.
