Gender pay gap bot 'keeps pressure on companies', co-founder says

Francesca Lawson (left) and Ali Fensome set up the bot to force more accountability

The co-founder of a Twitter bot that highlights companies' gender pay gap said it works "as a catalyst to keep pressure on companies to act".

The Gender Pay Gap Bot automatically replies to companies that tweet in support for International Women's Day with their gender pay gap data.

Businesses often proclaim support for their female workforce on the platform.

Francesca Lawson said the bot helps people not "take these sorts of messages of empowerment at face value".

Ms Lawson and Ali Fensome, both 28 and from Manchester, created the bot in 2021.

They were inspired by other automated Twitter accounts and wanted to force "a bit more accountability" around International Women's Day.

Their system pulls statistics from the official gov.uk website, through which UK companies with more than 250 employees are required to publish their payroll data, and takes a comparison of men's and women's average pay across the organisation.

The account now also lets users tweet requests for data from a specific company.

Ms Lawson, a freelance copywriter and social media manager, said the bot "potentially tapped into something" and "this frustration is not unique to me".

"If I'm that inspirational then pay me properly," she said.

"People are getting wise to the kind of corporate virtue signalling and having the wool pulled over their eyes a bit in terms of how businesses talk about themselves versus how they actually act the other 364 days of the year."

She said the data shows the gender pay gap is "still a massive problem" and "by keeping it front of mind, we can use it as a bit of a catalyst just to keep that pressure on companies to act on their data and to use it to inform what they do in their organisations to challenge inequality."

Some of the companies the bot has already called out in 2023 for their most recent available pay data include St Mary's University, the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and airline Emirates.

Many were also found to have equal pay for men and women, like Barnsley Council and Derby City Council.

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