Gender pay gap bot targets law firms (again!)
It’s back with added accountability

A Twitter bot that gained a huge following last International Women’s Day for broadcasting details of big firms’ gender pay gap has sprung into action once more.
The account @PayGapApp became notorious for retweeting law firm and other employers’ tweets commemorating the global day with an auto-response detailing their median hourly pay gap using data from a UK government website.
This year the bot has returned to its work but this time with the added ability to detail how each firm’s gap has changed since last year. Explaining the new feature the bot tweeted that it will allow followers to “see who’s making progress, and who’s letting the gap widen”.
The bot is even taking requests, encouraging Twitter users to “Tweet ‘@paygapapp pay gap for (company name)’ to get a reply with an employer’s pay gap stats”.
This year’s IWD theme is ‘#EmbraceEquity’ and many firms have marked the occasion with tweets describing their commitment to improving gender equity.
Here are some of the legal establishments where the gap has remained the same or widened over the past 12 months, according to the bot:
Birketts
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 31.5% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 11.3 percentage points wider than the previous year. https://t.co/pjWdLEO0Lv
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Crown Prosecution Service
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 28.3% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 8.2 percentage points wider than the previous year. https://t.co/dqG6YeQ4es
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Menzies
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 18.2% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 4.1 percentage points wider than the previous year. https://t.co/qPJqV1DWTg
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Mishcon de Reya
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 33.2% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 5.4 percentage points wider than the previous year. https://t.co/INfdO49inA
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Moore Barlow
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 34.4% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 5.6 percentage points wider than the previous year. https://t.co/W5A9uAG9Ns
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Stephensons Solicitors
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 37.6% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 3.2 percentage points wider than the previous year. https://t.co/ujBnSiqFmx
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
These are the legal establishments where the gender pay gaps have narrowed over the past 12 months or there is no previous data:
Brodies
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 11.6% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 2.6 percentage points smaller than the previous year. https://t.co/4imYoCmorU
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Forbes Solicitors
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 37.7% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 3.4 percentage points smaller than the previous year. https://t.co/2Oo5EhYh5M
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
The Law Society
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 4.7% lower than men’s. The pay gap is 6.6 percentage points smaller than the previous year. https://t.co/mQTWVvNFHW
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Mewburn Ellis
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 17.8% lower than men’s. https://t.co/vqnpc7RGNG
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
Shearman & Sterling
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 52% lower than men’s. https://t.co/xPFhnFC95f
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 6, 2023
Talbots law
In this organisation, women’s median hourly pay is 28.4% lower than men’s. https://t.co/jPtVfoodFF
— Gender Pay Gap Bot (@PayGapApp) March 8, 2023
All employers with 250 or more employees are required by law to publish their gender pay gap figures each year. These can all be searched for and compared using the government’s official ‘gender pay gap service’ which is understood to be the bot’s point of reference.
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25 Comments
Anonymous
Did anyone improve??? Come on
Anon
Reading comprehension not your strong suit? Several above improved.
Smack that bot
Everything about this story is pathetic, from the vacuous use of social media to fuel these annual virtue-signalling festivities, to the equally vapid reliance on meaningless “gender gap” data by pro-discrimination activists.
The alleged gender pay gap is a function, given median wages are a focus of the useless “pay gap” data, of administrative support functions being undertaken by mostly female staff. One answer to that would be to try to positively discriminate in favour of men for such roles, which would lower the male median income. That would result in a reduction the total employment numbers for women as a whole. Is reducing total female employment what these activists want? (Outsourcing some of the lower paid roles to agency workers is a great way to move the dial, if management want an easy way to show “progress” when reporting this nonsense.)
In law firms it is also function of the effect of women choosing to have children and either leaving the workplace or taking roles that pay less. That is not a function of discrimination against women, it is a function of middle class lifestyle choices by women.
Of course, the best option is just to abolish the pointless burden on business to collect such useless data and end the need to report on the so-called gender pay gap once and for all.
HR
‘…it is a function of middle class lifestyle choices by women’.
Do those women make a choice to have a child independently, then, without any men participating in that choice? I’d imagine generally not, but it is women whose career development subsequently stalls. More affordable childcare in the UK (eg the German model) would make an enormous difference to this; the cost of childcare means many women cannot afford to return to work even if they would prefer to.
HR HR
Who are you going to ask to pay more tax for that? And does that not show why the gender pay gap reporting is nonsense because it is driven by national factors and has nothing to do with businesses.
Knight knight
The crickets are a-chirping’. HR would like the money to magically appear.
Bored of 'diversity' whinges
Agreed. The sex pay gap is nonsense (sex, as gender is an invented social construct). It is a made-up figure for those craving victimhood. Men and women make different choices. They therefore get different outcomes. People doing the same job are paid the same: it has long since been unlawful to do otherwise. As politically unpalatable as this may be to the Woke Taliban, the reality is that given freedom of choice, women make different choices to men:
“84% of working women told ForbesWoman that staying home to raise children is a financial luxury they aspire to…more than 1 in 3 resent their partner for not earning enough to make that dream a reality.”
Is ‘Opting Out’ The New American Dream For Working Women?, Meghan Casserly, Forbes Magazine, 12 September 2012.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/09/12/is-opting-out-the-new-american-dream-for-working-women
See also, “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It, published in 2017, which bluntly warns:
“[…] bias-based unequal pay for women is largely a myth: [women] are most often paid less than men not because they are discriminated against, but because they have made lifestyle choices that affect their ability to earn.Why Men Earn More argues that while discrimination sometimes plays a part, both men and women unconsciously make trade-offs that affect how much they earn. Farrell clearly defines the 25 different workplace choices that affect women’s and men’s incomes — including putting in more hours at work, taking riskier jobs or more hazardous assignments, being willing to change location, and training for technical jobs that involve less people contact — and provides readers with specific, research-supported ways for women to earn higher pay.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Men-Earn-More-Startling-ebook/dp/B06ZZ2Y4JL
TooWokeToSleep
This is not comparing the same jobs. A huge proportion of legal secretaries are female. That’s going to massively skew the number. I’m not saying there is nothing to resolve here (there certainly is!), but it’s not very helpful if we don’t identify where the main issues reside. Clearly pay should not be determined by gender. Start there. Find like for like jobs, call out bad practices.
Anon
Ok, and the majority of facilities, mailroom etc. are men. NEXT.
Woke This
In most firms security and facilities are contractors, and often the role of the landlord operate the site rather than tenants anyway, whereas administrative and secretarial support are employees. So that makes a nonsense data set even more meaningless.
🤡
Lol “woke agenda”. 🤡
Resits are inminently coming up, fresher. You won’t get to run for General Committee on the uni’s Brexit Club if you get expelled from law school for failing resits! Better get cracking with Criminal Law Nutshells!
Woke This
A poor example of a rather tragic internet trope used by the witless basic whereby they reply to a post by creating a false description of the poster and then use that false description to undermine the post.
And you could not be more wrong in your imagined description if you tried.
Woke This
Yes, you can move the dial on the reporting the gender pay-gap to make it look like your firm is pushing the woke agenda by contracting out catering and cleaning services, shifting low paid women off the books, and, if you want to go for the extreme version hiring in rather than contracting out security, maintenance and lower paid jobs with a more male leaning profiles.
Bored of 'diversity' whinges
Correct. Annabel Denham wrote this concise summary of why the gender pay pay hysteria is simply left-wing rubbish:
** Feminists mislead women with talk of the gender pay gap **
Annabel Denham, 30 November 2020, The Times
Amid the biggest health and economic crisis Britain has faced in peacetime, the Fawcett Society saw fit on November 20 to celebrate the highlight of its year: Equal Pay Day. As usual, it was accompanied by hysterical cries that women were “working for free until the end of December!”
It has been illegal since the 1970 Equal Pay Act to pay men and women different wages for the same work. Fawcett’s assertion is based on cherry-picking data that paints a misleading picture and feeds a tired narrative of sexism in the workplace.
What’s more, it uses mean rather than median data (in contrast with the Office for National Statistics), which enables it to include a small number of exceptionally high salaries, distorting the true picture. And it fails to take into account key differentials: the type of job, educational qualifications, work experience, or less tangible qualities that lead an organisation to rate one employee above another.
The real problem with the determination of groups like the Fawcett Society to “expose” gender pay gaps — such as the requirement for organisations with more 250 employees to publish wage data — is that it harms business. It triggers unjust demonisation of companies by comparing the salary of a male chief executive with that of a female trainee. It deters businesses from hiring female staff in lower-paid but essential roles. It sows discord among workers. And it tells young women that, no matter how hard they work or how talented they might be, they will never be as successful as their male counterparts.
In the coming weeks and months feminists will doubtless ramp up their panicked reports of women faring worse than men during the pandemic. This isn’t supported by the evidence. From July to September the female unemployment rate was 4.3 per cent, compared with 5.2 per cent for men. The redundancy rate, per thousand, was 10.9 for women and 11.6 for men. Women are disproportionately employed in the public sector, where workers are more concerned about salary freezes than they are about job losses.
The left’s fixation with pay needs to end. Why shouldn’t people choose careers that offer a better work-life balance or flexible hours instead of big headline salaries? Why should jobs be evaluated on wage rather than fulfilment? Far better to circumvent the obsession with female victimhood, celebrate the astounding revolution in women’s lives over the past century, and focus on those areas where women still deserve better.
Annabel Denham is director of communications for the Institute of Economic Affairs think tank
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/feminists-mislead-women-with-talk-of-the-gender-pay-gap-9sgmkgcvg
Djed
Yawn – the gender pay gap has been debunked for years now. Also, why are gender issues only brought up when it affects women? There are other industries/jobs which are female dominated, why don’t the SJWs talk about that more often?
Anonymous
Won’t somebody please think of the men!
Anon
This comment was definitely written by a privileged white woman
Smile you are on CCTV
For the gender pay gap gibberish there is a great little ruse to make the results look better. The Government guidance says “If an employee does not self-identify as either gender, you can exclude them from your calculations.” So all you need are a few men to say they don’t self-identify as either a man or a woman and you can quite properly leave their earnings completely out of the calculations. Happy days.
Anonymous
The ‘gender pay gap’ has nothing to do with gender, but is due to people being paid different rates for doing different jobs. Most people know that by now.
Woke This
And yet we still have to waste time and money collecting the data and the woke crowd still use the data to push for more and more workplace discrimination to advance their agenda.
Bored of 'diversity' whinges
Correct. Kate Andrews, Economics Correspondent at The Spectator, has written extensively about the so-called ‘pay gap’. For example:
“** The problem with the gender pay gap obsession, Spectator, 4 April 2019 **
Would we condone teaching a child that 1+1 = 3, for the sake of increasing her interest in maths? No. Would we praise flat earth theorists for getting people talking about the health of the planet? No. So why are we giving credence to meaningless and often deceptive gender pay gap statistics, which have us focusing on women’s issues in a way that is damaging to women? With Brexit-mania dominating our national debate, you may have missed that today is the deadline for large organisations to report their gender pay gap data.
Now into the second year of reporting, it has become increasingly clear that the influx of data from the gender pay gap reporting measures fails to provide any meaningful insight into fair pay for men and women in the workplace. …The measures don’t even distinguish between full-time and part-time workers, which makes a huge difference to results.
To highlight just how bad the reported data is, look at the accusations made against the National Health Service and its alleged gender pay gap. The public body has been flagged for its 23 per cent gender pay gap – a gap that increases to 33 per cent when just looking at GPs. But the majority of NHS professionals are on a national pay scale, almost completely removing questions of gender discrimination in wages, as they are not subjectively set by managers, but instead set irrespective of circumstance by the state.
Pay differences in the NHS are not about gendered pay gaps, but rather the number of hours worked by employees. Indeed, over 50 per cent of GPs are women, and they are more likely to work part-time. This is not rocket science, nor is it a conspiracy theory. It’s fairly simple stuff when the data is presented accurately. Unfortunately, the current legislation is not rooted in reason.”
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-problem-with-the-gender-pay-gap-obsession
Bored of 'diversity' whinges
As others have noted above, the so-called sex* pay gap is a myth. (* gender is a grammatical term). Some useful links:
Stop unfairly demonising firms that have large gender pay gaps, City AM, 5 April 2019, https://www.cityam.com/stop-unfairly-demonising-firms-have-large-gender-pay-gaps
The Gender Pay Gap Reporting Measures: 2019 Update, IEA, 4 April 2019, https://iea.org.uk/publications/the-gender-pay-gap-reporting-measures-2019-update
Nature/Nurture. Sex differences are evolutionary. Social influence and resource control,involved more male-on-male violence for men and communal activities for women. Sex differences from the imposition of stereotypes and cannot be altered by the edicts of gender theorists or central government policy scolds. https://quillette.com/2020/10/20/the-real-causes-of-human-sex-differences
Choices, not discrimination. Sex differences in work-life trade-offs and occupational attainment persist despite much money and time devoted to eliminating them. As long as men and women have control over their work-life choices, women’s greater investment in children means that reams of policy edicts, labor laws, and other forms of social engineering will not change sex differences. https://quillette.com/2020/11/02/sex-differences-in-occupational-attainment-are-here-to-stay
Politically Incorrect Paper of the Day: The Persistence of Pay Inequality
by Alex Tabarrok, October 8, 2020 at 7:25 am
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2020/10/politically-incorrect-paper-of-the-day-the-persistence-of-pay-inequality.html [extract: Gender wage gaps appear even in markets where workplace discrimination is impossible or unlikely. Uber driver’s for example are assigned trips using a gender-blind algorithm and earn according to a known formula based on time and distance of trip. Yet, a small but persistent gender gap of about 7% exists (https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2018/02/uber-pay-gap.html) which appears to be due mostly to the fact that male drivers drive a little bit faster, choose to work in more congested areas, and have a bit more experience. Litman et al. (2020) (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0229383) show that the same kind of difference also show up in earnings on Mechanical Turk…]
Bored of 'diversity' whinges
It has been illegal since the 1970 Equal Pay Act to pay men and women different wages for the same work.
The sex pay gap is nonsense (sex, as gender is an invented social construct). It is a made-up figure for those craving victimhood. Men and women make different choices. They therefore get different outcomes. People doing the same job are paid the same: it has long since been unlawful to do otherwise. As politically unpalatable as this may be to the Woke Taliban, the reality is that given freedom of choice, women make different choices to men.
Each new generation of young men needs to understand that women are trying to impose affirmative action and blackmail to force de facto quotas at their expense, and each new generation of young women gets the opportunity to contrive, fetishise and weaponize victimhood in pursuit of status, resources and self-aggrandizement – or to pursue success based solely on their merits.
Affirmative action lobbies deliberately conceal key differentials when reporting salaries: the type of job, educational qualifications, work experience, and less tangible qualities that lead an organisation to rate one employee above another, including putting in more hours at work, taking riskier jobs or more hazardous assignments, being willing to change location, and training for technical jobs that involve less people contact. Left wing analyses which, for example, compare the salary of a male chief executive with that of a female trainee, are actively damaging. They deter business from hiring female staff in lower-paid but essential roles. They sow discord among workers, and tell young women that, no matter how hard they work or how talented they might be, they will never be as successful as their male counterparts.
The left’s fixation with pay needs to end. Why shouldn’t people choose careers that offer a better work-life balance or flexible hours instead of big headline salaries? Why should jobs be evaluated on wage rather than fulfilment?
Misogyny Lives
Some of the misogyny and arrogance (not to mention use of highly selective and historic ‘evidence’) in this Comments section reminds me why I mostly hate lawyers.
If the gender pay gap is just about secretaries mostly being female, please explain the gender pay gaps at law firms which don’t engage secretaries e.g. Knights plc – 39% gender pay gap.
Knight knight
Who?