An insider writes It’s tough at the BBC for women
As the equal pay row intensifies, an anonymous female employee explains how the BBC is failing to keep its own house in order
It is a brutal business, winning equal pay. As many of us at the BBC are discovering, it can be distressing, frustrating and exhausting. The emotional arc is nearly always the same – and it usually begins with shock. Many of my female colleagues have suspected for years that they are being underpaid compared with the men, but the pay structure here is so complicated, and salaries so opaque, that it can be difficult to find out for sure. When your fears are confirmed, it comes as a terrible jolt.
Dozens, if not hundreds, of us women employed by the BBC share the same sense of betrayal that Carrie Gracie wrote about in her open letter earlier this month, explaining why she was resigning as China editor after finding out she was paid less than male editors. We too feel let down by a trusted employer; one that talks about values and spends so much time “speaking truth to power” – and yet is failing to keep its own house in order.
“It never occurred to me that I would be paid less than a male colleague,” confided one of the members of BBC Women – a campaign group of more than 130 female producers and broadcasters, set up in the wake of last summer’s revelation that two thirds of the corporation’s highest earners are male. “Now I realise pay inequality can be found at pretty much every level of the BBC.”
Of course, the sums being talked about are beyond the reach of most of us. And, for some, the idea of six-figure salaries, paid for out of licence fee money, will rankle. But that is to miss the point: this is not simply a grab for cash. When BBC bosses offered Gracie a £45,000 rise – which would have taken her wage to £180,000 – she turned it down, saying she didn’t want more money, just equality. And, lest we forget, this is not only about the top earners, rather it affects us all, right down to the junior researcher earning £23,000 a year.
After shock comes denial, infused with an acidic dose of self-loathing. You blame yourself for “allowing” the situation. As a senior producer told me: “I’ve spent my whole career challenging received wisdom and asking difficult questions of those in power – so how did I let this happen to me?”
Yet, taking on the might of a big employer like the BBC can be so frightening that many of us have talked ourselves out of tackling our bosses. We have told ourselves not to rock the boat, that now is not a good time, or that we don’t want to get labelled as troublemakers – you just dare not put your head above the parapet. Even Gracie stayed silent for six months in the hope that the BBC would just sort it all out.
And then there’s the management culture – not just the male bosses but the female ones, too.
“A big obstacle is the fear of raising the issue of pay with them, even after decades of service,” one female journalist observed. Casual approaches invariably fail, so the next step is a formal grievance; a process that seems designed to obfuscate and stall. And as one manager told a female employee: “You can try, but you will never win.”
The seemingly insurmountable task makes you despair – but the idea of giving up and colluding in your own discrimination is worse than carrying on. So you harness your anger and embark on the all-consuming, nauseating, hard grind of collecting evidence, trawling through old emails, and building your case – all to secure what the law already says women and men should automatically have: equal pay for work of equal value.
No matter how watertight your argument, you will be fobbed off for months, with every excuse possible leveraged to throw you off the scent: your male colleague has more experience; his is a “legacy salary”; his pay is “an anomaly”; he is not your true comparator – even though you have sat next to him and done the same thing for 20 years, while earning thousands of pounds a year less.
Those tired words will likely be familiar to women embroiled in equal pay battles all over Britain. The BBC’S North America editor Jon Sopel does a fine job reporting on the ups and downs of the Trump administration, but is he really worth more than any other foreign editor? In China, Gracie was under constant state surveillance – not to mention that she could only do the job because she was fluent in Mandarin. And what about the BBC’S multi-lingual Europe editor, Katya Adler, who is frequently on air explaining the complexities of Brexit?
It makes your head spin. It fills you with self-doubt. For a while you swallow the lie, as your own common sense deserts you and your self-esteem takes a nosedive. It saps your confidence, affecting you at work and seeping into your home life. Sleepless nights become the norm. The stress of it can cause anxiety and makes some women ill. “I suddenly began to doubt my ability to do the job I’ve done all my adult life, but I’ve had to carry on and pretend nothing was wrong,” a BBC reporter friend told me only this week.
For years, women at the BBC have felt desperately alone – unsure if they were being paid less, unsure how to tackle it if they were. It is not the “done thing” to talk about money, and that only added to the sense of isolation. But now we are having candid conversations with each other. We have formed powerful new allegiances. Together, we have taught ourselves about equal pay law, and we use its terminology every single day: comparators, material factors, “tainted by sex”.
The happy and unexpected consequence of this upheaval has been new friendships with colleagues of every age and at every grade, in different parts of the BBC, all over the world; people you didn’t know a few months ago. It makes the bruising struggle and frequent setbacks just that little bit more tolerable. As a documentaries producer told me: “It means a lot to see senior colleagues taking such a stance. It suddenly feels like you have a whole weight behind you.”
And there are glimmers of hope: whispered success stories of those who have won equal pay (and even apologies from bosses); lawyers and union reps who can offer support and solace, and help you try not to take it all too personally.
More of our male colleagues are slowly voicing their support, too – and most are right behind us (although there aren’t many BBC women who buy the line that John Humphrys was merely joking when he was recorded off-air, last week, talking about equal pay – please spare us your “banter”).
The language is changing, too – the BBC’S previous commitment to “closing the gender pay gap” has given way to “equal pay in accordance with the law”. This apparently small step represents real progress to us.
We know we have a long way to go and there are other inequalities that we will need to tackle given time – maternity discrimination, part-time working, and pay inequality for BAME staff and those with disabilities. But, for now, we are emboldened and better informed.
A producer in foreign news perhaps best summed up our hopes: “I firmly believe what we’re doing is for the benefit of women to come,” she told me. “I couldn’t look my daughter in the eye if I didn’t stand up with the rest of the BBC Women.”