Burger King in the Hot Seat for Tweeting “Women Belong in the Kitchen” On International Women’s Day

On the list of things not to write on International Women’s Day in my book as a Communications person would likely be any stereotypes women have fought the last century to get beyond, yet that’s exactly what Burger King shot for today. Headlines were made when their UK account tweeted, and I quote “Women belong in the kitchen.” I’ve actually written similar to someone but as a clear joke and not even that literal. The point is I didn’t do it representing a Fortune 500 company either. This left me in tears, wheezing for breath. Did the intern wake up and decide he wanted to take the company down in the worst way possible?

Now in the author’s defense, it was done to try to get more women in the kitchen at their restaurants saying “Only if they want to, of course,” immediately afterwards. That doesn’t take away from the first tweet going viral. The second tweet continued saying, “Yet only 20% of chefs are women. We’re on a mission to change the gender ratio in the restaurant industry by empowering female employees with the opportunity to pursue a culinary career.”

Once the backlash settled in and the person who wrote it hopefully was fired or sent to the corner in a dunce hat to think about what they wrote, an apology was issued saying, “We got our initial tweet wrong and we’re sorry. Our aim was to draw attention to the fact that only 20% of professional chefs in UK kitchens are women and to help change that by awarding culinary scholarships.”

But then after deleting the tweet, they then shifted blame to the negative reactions saying, “It was brought to our attention that there were abusive comments in the thread and we don’t want to leave the space open for that.” Yeah, wonder why people are being nasty in response to this, numbnuts…

Other brands had a blast with this with KFC posting a meme saying, “The best time to delete this post was immediately after posting it. The second best time is now,” written by the Colonel in front of a classroom because clearly they need to learn a thing or two about, well… common sense.

Oh, and then they had the nerve to respond to KFC arguing about why they wrote it… which also is still up.

Political wingnut Mark Dice of course immediately agreed with the original statement because of course he would cosign the most bigoted remark of the day on this app. Why wouldn’t he?

Our favorite response was the woman who said if Western civilization depends on women cooking for men, then let Western civilization fall.

And while this is a joke, let’s hope they don’t choose to do the following for Gay Pride..