Sarah Smith launches tirade at BBC bosses over sexism
‘Derisory pay rises’
ONE of the BBC’s most senior journalists in Scotland yesterday branded its gender pay gap ‘outrageous’ and ‘illegal’.
Sarah Smith lashed out at her bosses after revelations that female staff are paid less than male colleagues who do the same jobs.
Dozens of BBC stars and journalists – including Miss Smith – have put their names to a letter to director Tony Hall, demanding urgent action to address the disparity.
Last week, the BBC was forced to publish a list of staff who earn more than £150,000.
Claudia Winkleman was the only woman in the top 20 earners, making between £450,000 and £500,000 last year – much less than DJ Chris Evans’s £2.2million to £2.25million.
Yesterday, BBC Scotland Editor Miss Smith branded the handling of the pay scandal ‘astonishing’. She spoke out at a gender equality event, where Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson told how the broadcaster paid her less than her male co-host on a radio show.
Miss Smith said: ‘I put my name to a letter at the weekend demanding equal pay for women in the BBC.
‘I don’t particularly think I’m asking for a pay rise myself, it’s for my female colleagues who aren’t getting paid as much as men do who do their job. I was going to say it’s outrageous, it’s also illegal to pay women less for doing equal work with men, even though we know it goes on all over the place.
‘But there is also the initial problem of women not being promoted into the positions they want, even being able to compete on that playing field.’
Miss Smith, the daughter of the late Labour leader John Smith, added: ‘The BBC has known for over a year that it was going to have to publish these salaries and appears to do very little other than have a couple of meetings, I think, with two or three female presenters a week before the salaries were published, and offered them fairly derisory pay rises that would have knocked them up a band by about £5,000.
‘They knew they were going to get this amount of publicity and yet they still seem to have done absolutely nothing about it, it’s astonishing.’
Miss Smith was moderating at the Aberdeen Asset Management Leadership Forum, where Miss Davidson revealed that when she was in her twenties and working for the BBC, she was paid a third less than her radio co-host. He told her so that she could ask for an increase.
She said: ‘I was terrified, I had never done anything like that before.’
Miss Davidson called for other public sector broadcasters, including Channel 4, to publish lists of journalists, hosts and stars earning more than £150,000 a year to ‘force organisations to explain, if there is a difference, why that difference exists’.
She added: ‘In some cases there may be a good reason, but in others there may not.
‘It may be systemic and sometimes even unnoticed bias that requires addressing.’