London, UK - What was Burger King thinking? On International Women's Day, the well-known fast food chain tweeted something very inappropriate.

Weren't the marketing experts aware of the blunder they were about to make?

On Monday, International Women's Day of all days, Burger King's UK Twitter channel read: "Women belong in the kitchen."

Two more tweets followed immediately after: "If they want to, of course. 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."

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It also went on to say, "We are proud to be launching a new scholarship programme which will help female Burger King employees pursue their culinary dreams!"

The initial tweet was just meant to get people's attention, but given all the negative reactions, the PR stunt seems to have backfired.

"This is the worst PR move of all time HAHAHA," one user commented.

"You got any idea how many people are only gonna look at the first one/see screenshots of it without the second one," another pointed out, adding: "lmao someone in the marketing department doesn’t understand Twitter very well."

The tweet's ratio tells you all you need to know about just how right that last user was. While the original tweet received over 600,000 likes, the second only got 130,000. Fittingly, another female commenter wrote: "The difference in likes between the first and the second tweet scares me."

Burger King initially defended the provocative post: "Why would we delete a tweet that’s drawing attention to a huge lack of female representation in our industry, we thought you’d be on board with this as well?"

Late Monday night, however, the original tweet was deleted after all and a mealy-mouthed apology followed: "We got our initial tweet wrong and we're sorry."

Whatever the fast food giant's intention, that was an almighty PR flop!