Carrie’s war
Carrie Gracie talks to Janet Christie about her battle with the BBC for equal pay
When Carrie Gracie discovered male colleagues in comparable posts at the BBC were earning at least 50 per cent more than she was, the China Editor’s efforts to right the wrong turned into an exhausting battle which revealed the culture of inequality at the corporation. The Scottish journalist talks to Janet Christie about telling her story in her book, and a society where ‘unequal pay is baked into our world’
“I like to think the people who should do something differently next time are the bosses”
In the summer of 2017, after three decades with the BBC, their China Editor Carrie Gracie was having a rare family break in her native Scotland. Gazing out at the Atlantic rollers crashing onto the shores of the Isle of Barra, rather than relaxing and enjoying the view, she was in shock.
A few days earlier the BBC had published all salaries it paid higher than £150,000. Gracie wasn’t surprised to see Gary Lineker, Chris Evans and Graham Norton heading a fat-cat list top-heavy with white men. What was a surprise was the presence of the North America Editor with whom 57-year-old Gracie had been promised pay parity when she took the China Editor job four years earlier. Now it seemed he was being paid close to double what she was.
During her time in China Gracie had covered big events such as the death of Deng Xiaoping, the handover of Hong Kong, the Beijing Olympics, and hundreds of stories that charted the growth of China into a world superpower, including the changes in White Horse Village from rural backwater to huge city, winning a Peabody and an Emmy for her films. She was China correspondent, Beijing bureau chief, presenter on the BBC News Channel and host of the weekly BBC World Service’s The Interview.
“I felt that my work was of equal value and as a matter of self-respect it was important to me to insist on that,” she says. “And it was not just a mistake about my pay, but a mistake of undervaluing women that ran throughout the organisation.
“That’s not surprising because unequal pay is baked into our world. Women are first, second generation immigrants to many workplace worlds, and they come in often at a disadvantage and undervalued. It was a systemic problem.”
Her sense of betrayal was about to give way to anger and returning to London, she resigned as BBC China Editor, citing pay discrimination over gender. Along with her colleagues in BBC Women, a group of staff set up to campaign for equality, she fought a headline-grabbing year-long battle for equal pay.
“I did it because I believe in truth telling at the BBC. It was part of my moral compass as a journalist to ensure the BBC lived up to its own stated values of fairness, truth telling, transparency and accuracy. They’re not just BBC values, they’re British values. I have been proud to be a BBC journalist for three decades or more and I worked hard to demonstrate those values in China, a country which does not always operate by them. I was not prepared to see them betrayed.”
Surveillance, censorship, intimidation – Carrie Gracie’s job in Beijing certainly had its challenges, but they were nothing compared to what she faced when she decided to fight for equal pay.
“I found myself feeling nostalgic for what seemed in retrospect a simpler life of tussling with the one-party state,” she writes in her book, Equal: A Story of Women, Men & Money ,now
out in paperback, with the title Equal: How We Fix The Gender Pay Gap.
Raised in the north east of Scotland, the daughter of an oil executive,
Gracie is one of five children, and as anyone with siblings knows, fairness is a fiercely defended principle in the family. Whether it’s biscuits or bonuses, anyone getting more than their share will be held to account.
“Fairness is important among children in a family.”
Does she think she was scrupulously fair with her grown up children, Rachel, 23, and Daniel, 21, from her marriage with Chinese rock musician Cheng Jin?
She laughs. “You’d have to ask them. But I hope so.
“We’re all human and make mistakes, but the problem at the BBC was not the mistake, it was how stubborn our management were in resisting a constructive effort to put it right.”
The BBC has also made a mistake in underestimating Gracie, who had joined the corporation in 1987 after studying at Oxford then teaching in China. A tiger in the Chinese zodiac, she’s a fighter, whose life up to this point had taught her to seize the day.
“I had breast cancer and a bilateral mastectomy in 2011 and chemo in early 2012, and one of the things that taught me is that life is short. It’s not the first time I’ve been taught that lesson because I lost my mum to cancer when she was 42 and I was 17, and my daughter had leukaemia when she was two. We have such a short time on this planet that we have to make the most of it.”
When negotiation failed, Gracie wrote an open letter that was published in the Times in January 2018, leaving her post as China Editor and accusing the BBC of breaking equality law. 130 BBC Women endorsed the letter.
“At first it is a very nasty shock to discover a big gap like that. You have to decide what to do. If they can’t put it right by means of a sensible conversation with their employer, many women will leave and be more vigilant in their next working environment. Some will pursue their previous workplace over the issue, some all the way to a tribunal. But that is a very difficult thing to do.”
At times Gracie found the equal pay fight harder than her battle with breast cancer – and in her book she has a warning for women considering taking it on.
“...women who go into unequal fights for equal pay must endure much misery in their effort to stand up for what is right and make the workplace safer for the rest of us.”
But that doesn’t mean she wouldn’t fight the same battle again, the same way.
“I like to think the people who should do something differently next time are the bosses. They hopefully learned they had made a mistake in undervaluing and underestimating women. We tried to talk to them constructively, didn’t want a public battle. I think we handled it well and it’s sad they didn’t.”
In July 2018, after a tortuous complaints process and a
parliamentary inquiry, Gracie won her fight and was awarded £373,000, which she gave to the Fawcett Society to spend on equal pay advice and support for women on low pay. Then she spent six months writing her book for the millions of women being undervalued and underpaid.
“I felt it was important to write, because you are not alone and you
can win. Here’s how, and here’s how to protect yourself. I also want men to read it, so that they share information about their pay, and if they’re decision makers, understand how unequal pay is baked into existing pay structures. If everybody tries to fix it together, we will move much faster towards solutions and women will not get crushed by daring to challenge and speak up.”
Gracie was not crushed by the experience but admits she came close, that “there were times when I found it very difficult to keep moving forward and believe I could get equal.”
In the book she quotes a line sometimes attributed to Mahatma Gandhi.
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you and then you win.”
What kept Gracie going was her friends and family, the grounding humour of her children, the support of her colleagues in BBC Women, her pro bono lawyers, and the thousands of women who wrote or stopped to talk to her.
Gracie won the battle but the war is ongoing. Conditions for some women are improving, but for her too slowly, especially in this 50th anniversary year of the Equal Pay Act.
“The responsibility is on all of us to change things, otherwise we will potentially go backwards. In 2018 when the first gender pay gap was reported there was shock at the scale and a lot of media coverage. A year later many employers had not narrowed the gap and a significant number have widened it, but there’s very little coverage. That’s worrying.
“It’s easy to think the battles are won, women are equal, but the truth is otherwise. This is a fight that has to be won day in, day out, week in, week out, year in, year out, decade in, decade out. It’s not as if it was won in 1970 and we can all rest easy. We can’t.”
Gracie believes the only way to get fairness in pay is to have transparency so that differences can be justified.
“The trouble is we live in a culture of enormous pay secrecy and where if it’s gone on for years, it’s harder to correct.
“Often it’s entirely fair for one person to be paid more, if they have more experience, skills, work longer hours. And maybe a person on less will think I’ll work hard to get that experience and skills, put in the extra effort and earn that salary next year.”
After years struggling with news editors to get China stories up the agenda, Gracie sees the irony in coronavirus putting it at the top of the headlines.
“People have said ‘I bet you’re glad you’re not in China at the moment’, and actually I feel quite the contrary,” she says. “It’s the first Chinese story since I left two years ago where I’ve thought ‘oh, I really wish I was there, that is an amazing story, in so many different dimensions’.
“I inevitably feel very sad for my Chinese family and friends and colleagues that it’s such an awful experience. I have an emotional connection with people and places there: it’s my second home.”
In January 2019 Gracie returned to her former post in the BBC Newsroom, working as a presenter on the News Channel, covering general news. She also presents Dateline
London, a weekly half hour TV show for the News Channel and BBC World, with four foreign Londonbased journalists, talking about the big stories. Paid equally now, Gracie is starting to lift her head from the equal pay argument, back towards a Chinese agenda.
She may have become an expert on equal pay and have a knack of infusing the issue with a wry humour, but her fun side bubbles out even more when she’s talking about her other speciality.
Films to get a flavour of the country that is her second home? She recommends last year’s So Long My
Son. “It’s moving, with memorable characters and uplifting moments, and The Farewell, which I love because it’s affectionate and funny, a good picture of a Chinese family. So often films about China are sombre and dark, so I like that someone’s brought a lighter touch.”
As for books, she suggests Karoline Kan’s Under Red Skies: Three Generations of Life, Loss, and Hope in China, a family saga from foot binding to feminism by a millennial writer who grew up poor in rural China and became a New York Times reporter based in Beijing.
“It’s about her own experiences and is a great insight into a young Chinese woman’s life, very contemporary,” says Gracie.
Which leads us on to discuss equal pay for such women in China today – is it better or worse than here?
“When the Communists came into power in 1949 they said women were equal and there wouldn’t be any more foot binding. There was a sustained effort to do structural things such as giving women responsibility in the workplace, maternity leave, sick pay, predictable employment contracts and some women benefited,” she says.
“Since China’s market reforms of the past 40 years some of that has fallen away and there are underlying gender imbalances and inequalities. It’s quite hard to say that right now in 2020 China’s workplaces are gender equal. Often women thrive in businesses they set up themselves, and a lot of rural women who had no money, no rights, very little power, with the modernisation got factory and service jobs, which put money in their pockets and allowed them to get out of their villages and the backbreaking farm labouring. So women who grew up in rural China have more opportunities probably now in 2020 than they would have had 30 years ago.”
On the issue of pay transparency Gracie thinks China is more progressive than the UK.
“Especially in lower levels of the economy or the state dominated public sector. People are less inhibited in talking about pay. But there’s still a lot of gender inequality with women expected to disproportionately look after children, old people and do support roles in the workplace. If you look at the top ranks of the leadership, they are all men.”
Change comes slowly, but it comes, for women in China and in the
UK: at the BBC, from high profile names like Samira Ahmed whose professionalism was finally judged to be equal to “the glint in Jeremy Vine’s eye”, to the women Glasgow City Council now paid equally. Gracie ends our chat with an anecdote that neatly illustrates the change that has come over China.
“I used to have a problem with sea cucumbers when I was first there in the 1980s because they’re a huge delicacy but I don’t like the texture or the taste. At official banquets I used to say please don’t feed me sea cucumber but they thought I was being polite, so I would get double. In those etiquette situations there was a tendency to go for the more complicated, double entendre kind of understanding of what somebody’s saying. So your manners kick in and you find yourself wading through the extra sea cucumber, they’re doubly out of pocket and I’m doubly unhappy ‘cos I’m eating double the amount.”
But times change and as the world moves on, the sea cucumber issue, like her own equal pay has been resolved for Gracie, although the struggle for others continues.
“It’s a different world there now, the sea cucumber thing doesn’t happen. In the 1980s there were huge amounts of protocol and foreigners were martians from outer space. Now if I say to a Chinese person I just don’t really like sea cucumber they will actually believe me.”
Ditto pay equality. If Gracie says her job is equal to that of a man, her experience and skills deserving parity of pay, these days people believe her.