Marketing

Burger King apologizes for 'Women belong in the kitchen' slogan

Photo: iStock.

March 9, 2021

An ad campaign promoting Burger King scholarships for female employees missed the mark Monday after the brand's U.K. arm tweeted, "Women belong in the kitchen." It later added, " If they want to, of course."

The campaign's goal was to call attention to the fact that just one-fifth of foodservice chefs are women, a problem Burger King's scholarship program hopes to address. A full-page New York Times ad with the same message also hit the streets Monday across the globe. The ad — obviously designed to play off the antiquated notion that women do not belong in the workplace, but in the home through sarcasm — failed miserably in achieving its ends, however. Social media channels lit up like bonfires with comments from those outraged by the declaration, falling as it did on International Women's Day.

One Georgetown University professor said that people around the globe saw the ad as a poor attempt at clicks that played off of the struggles of women, according to NBC.

"If you want to use sexism as clickbait, then you obviously are not celebrating International Women's Day," Kerry O'Grady, Georgetown University associate professor, told NBC.

By Tuesday, Burger King had deleted the tweet and apologized, saying its missed the mark on calling attention to the relative lack of women in foodservice leadership.