People Like Us: Autocorrected Pay Gap

Non-profit People Like Us, is highlighting autocorrect bias when it comes to names, often leading to misidentification and a sense of exclusion for individuals with diverse names. Its latest campaign taps into this insight to help correct the pay gap between ethnicities. The ‘Autocorrected Pay Gap’ campaign, created in partnership with Aussie expat creative director Tim Pashen and creative agency Worth Your While, uses real autocorrect examples to highlight that subconscious bias in favour of English-heritage names affects everything from autocorrect to your monthly pay packet. The national campaign is now live across multiple locations in the cities of London and Edinburgh. People Like Us works to address established inequity by creating accountability and tackling the ethnicity pay gap, campaigning for workplace equality and mandatory pay gap reporting. In 2022, People Like Us research showed workers from Black, Asian, Mixed Race and minority ethnic backgrounds are paid 16% less than their white counterparts. It also found that two thirds (67%) of racially diverse working professionals polled said they have had reason to believe that a white colleague doing the same job as them was on a higher salary. A quarter (24%) said they suspected the disparity in pay was up to £5,000, meaning people of colour could be losing out on £255,000 of earnings in a working lifetime due to the stark ethnic pay gap. The call to action across all the ‘Autocorrected’ executions drives to a petition that’s asking government to introduce mandatory ethnicity pay gap reporting.