Tuesday, March 8th 2022 was international women’s day.
This day is meant to be a global celebration of the social, cultural, and political achievements of women. However, this year the Twitter account @PayGapApp gave corporations a run for their money by creating an automated bot that responded to corporate tweets about International Women’s Day with data about the companies gender pay disparity. Since 2018, companies in Britain with more than 250 employees were required to report the gender pay gap within their business which can be found and searched via a government webpage. Francesca Lawson, one of the creators of the PayGap bot said she and her co-creator were inspired to create the bot to make the information more accessible to better hold companies accountable. In a quote to Fortune she said, “What I get annoyed at with International Women’s Day and any awareness event that is linked to a social issue, so say Pride, Black History Month, it’s all the same. Companies will show their support across all their comms and their social media, but they don’t provide any data or evidence to show what they are doing to challenge discrimination.”
The Pay Gap Bot Roasts Corporations
Some of these corporations were embarrassed so severely that they deleted their tweets or temporarily privated their twitter accounts after getting quote-tweeted by the Gender Pay bot such as the Royal Hospital School, LPP Investments, Kirklees College, and Tenovus Cancer Care.
Not all the Tweets were negative.
Some highlighted corporations that put their money where their mouth is and paid women and men equally.
The Pay Gap at SUNY Fredonia
For fun I decided to check the pay gap at SUNY Fredonia. Via OpenPayrolls I found a list of the top 100 highest paid employees at SUNY Fredonia and I then did some 6th grade math to figure out how many women made it in the top 100 list based on the 2020 payroll. Quick fun fact: fan favorite Stephen Kershnar secured a spot at 77 out of 982 employees at SUNY Fredonia making a healthy $90,724 per year.
(Disclaimer: I am not good at math and I will never claim to be good at math. Take these calculations with the knowledge that I still do addition with my fingers. If you do the math and find that I am way off please feel free to berate me on my instagram @eelekawnyltiak or tiktok account @taxfraud.gov.)
By my calculations (which again, are probably bad) men accounted for 60% or 59 people in the top 98*, while women accounted for 39% or 39 people. I also calculated people making over six figures a year and the numbers stayed relatively the same with men accounting for 65% or 34 people while women accounted for 34% or 18 people. Which isn’t like…the worst? It’s not good, but honestly as I was crunching numbers I was bracing myself for way worse. If I ever wake up with the sudden ability to do basic math and way too much time on my hands I may calculate the pay gap between all SUNY Fredonia employees.
*I couldn’t find information on two employees listed in the top 100 list so my calculations were done out of 98.
Legislation and Equality
Britain has required data from employers about their gender pay gap since 2018 and other countries like Germany and Australia have followed suit. But there is no law in sight that requires gender based income reports for American businesses, where according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics white women working full time earned only 82% of the wages that white men working full time made. This statistic gets lower depending on the woman’s race with black women at 67%, and hispanic women at 62%. Interestly though, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics asian women on average exceed the yearly wage of white men.
The moral of the PayGapBot is that if capitalists can get away with paying you dirt they will. In the United States we are long overdo for legislature that holds companies accountable. In the meantime, talk to your coworkers about your salaries. You are legally protected and it is the best way to advocate for yourself when you are being paid unfairly.
