Gender pay gap app takes on sanctimonious brands. Yahoo launched 27 years ago this week.

Some brands are great on social media when it comes to showing awareness and support for a particular cause. 

 

Others look a bit desperate and crass and sometimes even attract allegations of tokenism.

 

International Women’s Day earlier this week is one example and some companies even fell victim to the Gender Pay Gap Bot.

 

This is a Twitter account, set to find companies using social media to talk up some of their inclusion and diversity credentials but then alongside their original message, adds details of the gender pay gap and highlights situations where women are paid less than men.

 

As the @paygapapp says in its biography - employers, if you Tweet about International Women’s Day, I’ll retweet your gender pay gap.

 

It’s another example of how difficult it is to control the conversation on social media.

And a quick bit of internet history…it was this week back in 1995 that the Yahoo search engine launched and it was, for a while, one of the most recognised names on the world wide web.