Gender virtue-signallers put on the spot by Bot

International Women’s Day rapidly turned from a PR opportunity to a corporate ordeal on Tuesday, as firms were faced with the anger of a Twitter Bot.

The Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) had a straightforward premise to quote the tweets of companies and organisations mentioning IWD on Twitter, and highlight their most recent salary gap between men and women.

However, the outcome was an exposure of what some may suggest is the hypocrisy of praising the virtues of equality without putting it into practice. Some companies swiftly  deleted their original tweets, but this arguably worsened the situation.

Multiple organisations were targeted, including several law firms such as Blake Morgan, Ashtons Legal, Browne Jacobson, DWF Law, White & Case, Mishcon de Reya and Shearman & Sterling. Each companytweeted references to IWD, and each were then revealed to have approximately a 20% hourly pay gap between men and women.

Mishcon strongly opposed any suggestion of virtue signalling. We tweeted some statistics on female entrepreneurship,’ a spokesperson stated. 

However, despite the circumstances being fair or not, some firms will have detected a significant increase in their social media profile as a result.