Data link: https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/9L79N/2/
We collected data on twitter mentioning the 'UK gender pay gap' from three periods: pre-pandemic period, the first national lockdown period, and post pandemic period. Besides, according to the Pay Gap Reporting Act issued by the UK Government in 2017, organisations with 250 and more employees are required to report the pay gap in April each year, and those three periods include the reporting deadlines, which will help us collect enough data, as people may discuss more about gender pay gap in these periods.
In terms of the result, firstly, the number of tweets fell sharply from 211 in 2019 to 61 and 70 in the other two periods, respectively. Apparently, there is less discussion of the gender pay gap because of the covid-19, but the reasons are unknown. Secondly, there is a more equal proportion of male and female users who shared content about the gender pay gap in 2020 and 2021 than in 2019. But could this be an indication that men are more concerned about the gender gap than before?
We then analysed the content of the tweets further and found a clear contrast in attitudes towards the gender pay gap between Twitter users of different genders. The majority of female users shared their lives, data and news coverage of gender pay gap in the UK, and their concern or anticipation for the future, in a calm tone. However, while many male users shared data and news and hope the pay gap to narrow, some male users have negative attitudes towards the existence of the gender pay gap. Those comments can be seen in our creative video.
In terms of the characteristics of the people posting tweets, by analysing users’ profiles, we found that senior corporate leaders like founders, heads, owners, directors; academics like PhDs, professors, researchers, writers, editors were more likely to share content about the gender pay gap. Of course, it is also possible that these kinds of people are more willing to put their identity in their profiles. Besides, among female users, there is a segment of people who identify themselves as feminists.
However, there are limitations to the data scraping and analysis on Twitter. Firstly, as Twitter does not have the function of filtering user’s address to certain place, we can only change the searching word to ensure that the content is about the UK, which can lead to a large amount of missing data. Secondly, we categorised the gender of users by avatar, name and profile, the results may be inaccurate as the user do not necessarily provide their real information.
Raw data