Women’s Day: robot exposes companies that pay less – 03/07/2023 – Tech

“Actions, not speeches. Stop posting platitudes. Start solving problems.”

Under this mantra, the robot Gender Pay Gap App exposes British companies on Twitter that talk about International Women’s Day but pay their female workers less than their hired men.

How it works is simple: English organizations that tweet with the hashtag #IWD2023 receive a retweet informing the company’s wage gap by gender, captured by a public database on wages.

The profile on the social network, portrayed with a suffragette hat and a banner calling for the end of gender inequality, began denouncing wage differences in March 2021. The robot now has 234.7 thousand followers.

Since then, technology has exposed large organizations: Christian charity World Vision, for example, pays women 16.7% less; consultancy Deloitte in the United Kingdom, 15%. Universities, fire departments, city councils and other public bodies also had their wage gap by gender disclosed on the social network by the robot.

However, companies are not always caught in the act. In some cases, the opposite is true: The girl- and young women-focused charity Girlguiding pays female employees 30.5% more per hour. The Odeon cinema chain (owned by Kinoplex) promotes equal pay in the UK.

The feminist bot was created by writer Francesca Lawson and programmer Ali Fensome. She takes care of the communication strategy; he, of the information behind the platform. The algorithm for processing the data is available on the GitHub code social network.

The robot monitors accounts that post with hashtags or words related to International Women’s Day. Based on data crossing, it detects whether the tweet came from a company or entity and the name of that legal entity registered with the local administration.

Next, the algorithm searches for target company information on the Gender Pay Gap website, launched by the UK Ministry for Women in March 2017. That year, the British government made it mandatory for any contractor with more than 250 employees to disclose pay gaps. .

On this basis, there is information from 13,638 contractors — 1,223 companies with less than 250 employees share their data voluntarily. The next mandatory update is scheduled for April 4th.

The Twitter bot not only releases the most recent data on the wage gap, but also assesses whether the gap has increased, decreased or remained stable.

According to Francesca Lawson’s website, Gender Pay Gap App was created to denounce that 77% of companies paid men better than women in 2022, although they engaged in gender equality campaigns on International Women’s Day.

The British editor’s portfolio highlights a response to the lingerie manufacturer Boux Avenue, which had a pay gap of 59%, even with women as its main customers.

In Brazil, companies do not need to disclose wage inequality explicitly. Official records such as Rais and Caged make it possible to infer the pay gap between men and women.

The government of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) created a working group to formulate legislation to prohibit wage inequality in the country. The Minister for Women, Cida Gonçalves, says that the Equality Law will provide for penalties for employers who fail to comply with the rule and create incentive mechanisms for those who promote equity in the remuneration of male and female workers.