Hired to tackle Auntie’s gender wage gap, the firm that pays women 18% less than men!
THE BBC is facing a backlash for hiring an employment consultancy firm – which has a bigger gender pay gap than the broadcaster itself – to help resolve its equal pay claims.
Corporation chiefs turned to Croner in 2018 to help manage complaints that female staff were being paid less than men for equivalent work.
The BBC row erupted after Carrie Gracie resigned from her role as China editor in January 2018 when she learned that she was taking home tens of thousands less than US editor Jon Sopel.
Since then, the BBC has seen a flurry of claims from female employees. Only last week, Samira Ahmed won a landmark employment tribunal against the corporation. The tribunal found that she should be paid the same amount as fellow presenter Jeremy Vine for doing ‘very similar’ work.
Croner, which is based in Leicestershire, has played a key role in helping the broadcaster tackle its gender pay crisis, according to the Financial Times.
Staff from the consultancy sit on corporation panels that deal with equal pay grievances.
But BBC female employees are up in arms after learning that the median pay gap between men and women at Croner was 18 per cent according to 2018-2019 figures. That is more than double the 7.6 per cent the BBC posted in the same period.
A spokesman for Croner admitted to the Financial Times that it has a gender pay gap, but said it was ‘committed’ to achieving ‘gender balance at all levels of our business’.
A BBC spokesman said: ‘We want anybody who goes through a formal pay grievance to have full confidence in our processes and appointed Croner to be an independent expert on the decision-making panel.’