Montague right to highlight pay gap, say BBC colleagues

FEMALE staff at the BBC have backed Sarah Montague’s “unflinching, articulate” revelations about the Today programme’s pay gap.

The presenter, who left the show to present The World at One last month, said she was “incandescent with rage” when she discovered she was paid much less than her co-presenters on the flagship BBC current affairs show.

Her colleagues have since expressed support, with fellow Today presenter Mishal Husain tweeting: “What it feels like when the pay gap is personal.” She also called Ms Montague “unflinching” and “articulate”.

Woman’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey said she had “total support” for Ms Montague, while Victoria Derbyshire tweeted a link to her piece and said: “#equalpay is the law & applies to everyone wherever you work.”

Ms Montague was on a salary of £133,000, which she described as “a very good wage for a job that I loved”, but data published by the BBC last July showed that her co-host John Humphrys was earning up to £649,000.

In a piece for The Sunday Times, she said she “felt a sap” for “subsidising other people’s lifestyles”.

“I had long suspected that I was paid much less than my colleagues but until the pay disclosures, I had no idea of the scale of that difference,” she wrote.

The figures showed her colleagues were all earning substantially more.

A BBC spokesman said: “The BBC is committed to closing our gender pay gap by 2020, and figures show we are already performing better than most other media companies.

“We have also said that we want to introduce a clear and transparent pay framework for the future so everyone working for the BBC can have confidence that they are being paid fairly.”