Ahmed case: BBC’S female presenters came out in force to tackle the gender pay gap
Trio among 121 women who argued with corporation over their salary, NUJ witness statement reveals
BBC presenters Sarah Montague, Louise Minchin and Joanna Gosling have been named among 121 women who, it is claimed, began equal pay grievances against the BBC, said documents lodged with an employment tribunal.
The women believed “that they have received less pay and other less favourable terms in their contracts when compared with men doing the same or equivalent work at the BBC”.
The list of names, representing a communal revolt against the corporation, is included in a letter from the National Union of Journalists (NUJ) to the BBC and dates from December 2017, a few months after the corporation had been forced to publish details of its gender pay gap.
It was submitted as evidence in the case of Samira Ahmed, who has launched an equal pay case against the BBC. She is arguing that she was consistently underpaid in comparison to Jeremy
Vine for their work on similar television programmes.
Ahmed is suing or £693,000 in lost earnings.
In her evidence, Michelle Stanistreet, general secretary of the organisation, said: “In December 2017, the NUJ lodged a collective grievance to the BBC on behalf of the 121 members,” and directed the tribunal to the list of names. The BBC later rejected the request for a communal procedure.
The NUJ list features 121 presenters, journalists, editors and producers, from household names to backroom staff. Their jobs span BBC News, the World Service, Radio 3 and Radio 4.
Montague has previously said that she was “incandescent with rage” after learning in the BBC pay disclosures that she was paid £133,000 while her Radio 4 Today programme co-host, John Humphrys, earned up to £649,999 and Nick Robinson was on up to £299,000.
However, it was not public knowledge that she had lodged a formal grievance, as the tribunal document states. According to the most recent BBC figures, after switching to World at One she now earns £240,000.
Minchin, the BBC Breakfast presenter, did not make the 2017 list of stars earning £150,000 and over – a fact that raised eyebrows because Dan Walker, her co-presenter, earned significantly more.
Walker said at the time that the two were paid equally for the breakfast jobs and his extra fee was for hosting Football Focus. Minchin now earns up to £210,000. Joanna Gosling, the BBC News presenter, was paid just over £100,000 before the list came out, but
later discovered that male presenters of the same programmes were earning £150,000 for a four-day week.
It is not known how many women on the list have since settled their grievances – in its evidence to the tribunal the BBC said 36 increases have been awarded on the basis of equal pay, “mostly though not exclusively to women”. In addition to Ahmed, a dozen women are said to have reached the end of the internal grievance process without a satisfactory conclusion and are preparing to go to tribunal.
On her second day of giving evidence, Ahmed apologised to Vine for “dragging” him into the case.
She said Vine privately expressed solidarity with her case after hearing that she had earned less than £500 per episode while he was paid £3,000 per episode. “He seemed to acknowledge there was an awkwardness about the salary,” she said. “My issue is with the BBC, not with Jeremy. I’m sorry his name has been dragged into this.”
The BBC says the shows and presenters are not comparable because Points of View is a light entertainment programme and Vine is a household name.
Others on the list included Minchin’s BBC Breakfast colleague, Naga Munchetty; Rachel Burden, the Radio 5 Live presenter; Jane Hill, the BBC News presenter; and Orla Guerin, the award-winning foreign correspondent – three of whom previously signed an open letter demanding the BBC deal with the gender pay gap.
Hill said last night that she had not begun a formal grievance process. The others could not be reached for comment and it is unclear whether they pursued any formal complaint.
The Ahmed case continues.
‘My issue is with the BBC, not with Jeremy Vine. I’m sorry his name has been dragged into this’
Samira Ahmed’s unfair pay claim against the BBC has got Auntie doing some fascinating contortions. Ahmed told an employment tribunal this week that she had been paid seven times less than Jeremy Vine for doing equivalent work. While he got £3,000 per episode for presenting BBC One’s Points of View, she only got £440 a pop for a similar viewer feedback programme, Newswatch, on the BBC News Channel.
The BBC’S first surprising move was to dismiss its own news channel as “relatively niche”. When Ahmed’s lawyers pointed out that Newswatch actually pulled in 1.6 million viewers – twice as many as Points of View
– Auntie stood on her head, knotted both legs around her neck and tried a new angle.
Points of View, it argued, was an “entertainment” show, whereas Newswatch was merely a “serious news programme”. It required “a trained, serious news journalist, not a presenter with broad audience appeal”. According to this twist on Reithian values, Ahmed is worth less not because she’s a woman – heaven forfend! – but because she’s fully qualified to inform the viewers of her vastly more popular show. How’s that for a dismount?
I hope Ahmed wins her case – not just because she is a terrific broadcaster who should have been treated better, but pour encourager les autres. It might prompt other employers to have a skim through the payroll, check who’s getting what, and whether it seems fair.
What it won’t – can’t – do is solve the intractable problem of equal pay.
I’m not just talking about the underlying causes of the pay gap: the fact that women still shoulder by far the biggest burden of familial responsibilities, caring for both young and old, so that they end up taking part time and less prestigious jobs. I mean the actual process by which employees in the same company end up earning more or less than each other.
Most bosses, I would contend, don’t consciously enforce a gender pay gap. Day to day, they are too busy themselves to give much thought to what each of their employees is paid.
If you want more, you must summon up the courage to knock on the big glass door. Studies have shown that women are up to four times less likely to ask for a pay rise than men. When they do put in a request, it is more likely to be for flexible hours.
We can’t legislate to make women value money over time. Nor can we expect private firms to enforce parity, using the sort of grade structures that have had such a deadening effect on the public sector. That wouldn’t level the playing field, so much as crush the life out of it.
Employers need to be able to hire and promote people nimbly, and according to their own criteria. These are often so subjective as to be almost unknowable. Charisma, self-confidence, persuasiveness, decent grammar, nice pheromones – the qualities that make a desirable employee are as various and ineffable as the qualities of love. Comparing like with like – the only way to achieve perfect equality – is fiendishly difficult. How do you allow for personal chemistry, or timing, or luck? If a valued male employee gets a job offer elsewhere, should you desist from making a counter-offer lest it upset the gender balance?
This is not, quite, a counsel of despair. The pay gap is in fact shrinking, inch by agonising inch. The glass door awaits. We must summon the courage to knock on it.