The Beeb’s added insult to injury over gender pay gap
The shocking treatment of Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s former China editor who resigned in protest at being paid less than men in the same roles, sums up everything that has gone wrong in the way the corporation treats the women who work for it.
She has been briefed against, blanked by her managers once she protested, given a false record of her evidence to them, labelled inaccurately a part-timer.
At a select committee hearing, Gracie revealed that the BBC was insulting women as well as underpaying them. The BBC had finally offered her back pay this week, she said, but was now trying to justify her unequal pay by telling her that for the first three years in the job she had been ‘‘in development’’.
This is an outrage: a new category of job has been retrospectively created by the BBC to deny its record. It doesn’t even make sense, since the excuse was offered alongside money to Gracie to make up the gap. She turned it down.
It is, however, typical of the BBC’s attempt to evade the problem. They won’t get away with it. This week the corporation put out a report showing that male presenters in news earn substantially more than women in comparable jobs.
But the BBC and its directorgeneral are claiming that this isn’t the result of discrimination.
No sirree. It can’t be, you see, because it wasn’t intentional. ‘‘No one said, ‘you’re a woman therefore you’re going to be paid less’,’’ Lord Hall of Birkenhead, the director-general, declared.
The report he commissioned from PwC is completely in sympathy with him. While in some cases ‘‘men and women in comparable roles are paid differently’’, and on-air men are paid on average 7 per cent more, ‘‘we have not seen anything in our work that leads us to believe this is as a result of gender bias in the setting of pay’’.
This is dumbfounding. Or simply playing dumb. It’s as if 40 years of psychological research into unconscious bias never existed: literally thousands of studies showing how people who think they act fairly towards everybody nevertheless make negative assumptions about anyone outside the mainstream power group, and then act upon those assumptions.
Bias doesn’t have to be conscious to be real. Denying it doesn’t make it disappear. Let’s just remind ourselves of the facts on BBC pay that have emerged since it was forced to publish some of its data last summer.
Two-thirds of the highest-paid presenters are male. The top male sports presenter, Gary Lineker, earns close to £2 million; talented, industrious Clare Balding is on a tenth of that. The news presenter Huw Edwards earned £200,000 more than Antiques Roadshow presenter and news presenter Fiona Bruce.
These stories left women at the BBC reeling at how little they were valued, and 170 shocked presenters and producers created an informal group, BBC Women, to work for change.
This week’s report was intended by the BBC to defuse that tension. Female staff were hoping it would recognise the issue and propose proper remedies.
Instead the airy denials by senior managers that there is a systemic problem, just a few mistakes and disparities to be remedied, has ignited further rage.
‘‘What’s the mood? Fury!’’ one senior woman says. Much of it comes from the fact that many women already feel as if they have been tricked by managers they trusted. Just like Gracie, several had been explicitly assured that they were getting the going rate when they moved jobs or signed their contracts, only to find recently that this was a lie.
Others had never tried to check their comparative pay, simply taking for granted that an organisation like the BBC, which they love and admire, was treating them fairly.
‘‘It’s hard to explain how betrayed I feel,’’ another said. ‘‘I work the same shifts as a male presenter, doing exactly the same job, and have done for years, yet I now know he earns more than twice what I do.
‘‘It’s a life-changing difference. It comes to about a million pounds over a dozen years, which means he has a different life from me; a better house, money for his children, a much better retirement. This isn’t trivial. This is huge.’’
Ironically, no BBC editor would use such an unsatisfactory piece of work as a reliable source. Lord Hall now says he wants fair pay and transparency in the future. Many of his enraged female staff fear this won’t be enough unless it’s accompanied by swift, tangible action. They could go to court but most would rather not.
This battle matters because the BBC’s credibility rests on living the values it preaches: truth, equality, trust. It is also a role model. In April hundreds of companies will report their gender pay gaps.
If the BBC doesn’t lead the way in admitting and remedying its own injustices, that bodes badly for all of the women working everywhere else.