On Monday (March 8) Burger King U.K. received major backlash for tweeting a controversial statement on International Women’s Day. The now deleted “women belong in the kitchen” tweet was Burger King’s U.K.’s attempt to encourage women employees to “pursue a culinary career.”
Burger King U.K.’s tweet was a poor PR choice that overshadowed the following tweet about the wonderful Burger King scholarship program that just launched for women. Using shock value to draw attention to their new scholarship program that was created to help women advance within the culinary field was a critical mistake for the BK franchise.
As soon as the tweet made it to the digital universe it went viral and automatically got mega backlash despite it being deleted swiftly.
“I am so saddened by this. My heart is breaking we still need to have this conversation. Do better. Be better. Have more respect for us please,” JoJo Abbasi tweeted.
Shortly after the mass rejection of the initial tweet, Burger King U.K. issued an apology.
“We hear you. 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. We will do better next time,” Burger U.K. tweeted.
Burger King U.K. followed up with another apologetic tweet.
“We decided to delete the original tweet after our apology. 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,” Burger King U.K. tweeted.
Even after their apology there were some onlookers that weren’t accepting of it.
“I’m not a woman, I’m an afab nonbinary person, but I absolutely do not accept this apology. At the time I’m commenting this you haven’t even deleted the original tweet. You know what you were doing when you started a tweet like that, so no. I will not accept this,” one Twitter user tweeted.