People Like Us is highlighting autocorrect failures, often leading to misidentification and a sense of exclusion for individuals with diverse names. Their latest campaign taps into this insight to help underline the pay gap between ethnicities. Their national ‘Autocorrected Pay Gap’ billboard campaign goes live UK wide from 4 April, and uses real autocorrect examples to highlight that subconscious bias in favour of British-heritage names can affects everything from autocorrect to people's pay.
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 racially ethnic pay gap.
The problem with these types of clunky, and often, offensive autocorrections is that it perpetuates the myth that non-Anglophone names are foreign and difficult to pronounce. It reinforces a homogenous culture that excludes individuals with diverse backgrounds and undermines the efforts of organisations to promote diversity and inclusion in the workplace. Anyone with a diverse name can give you examples of it. Ayan becomes Alan, Rishad becomes Richard and so on. And if your name gets auto-corrected by default, your salary might also default to the national average of 16% less – a reality experienced by people of ethnically diverse backgrounds.Sheeraz Gulsher Co-founder of People Like Us
Diversity, Equity and Inclusion are hugely important to JCDecaux UK as part of our social priorities. We think the work that People Like Us are doing makes a difference in society and that's why we're currently gathering our data to be able to share our information in the near future.Carly Stanley People Director, JCDecaux UK
This campaign is supported by JCDecaux’s Community Channel. The Community Channel enables not-for-profit community and charitable projects to apply to access digital Out-of-Home locations, in line with JCDecaux’s purpose and values. Find out more here. People Like Us also partnered with independent creative agency Worth Your While to create this campaign.
