Why women need to know what their colleagues earn
BBC REVEAL SHOWS WOMEN MAKE UP ONLY A THIRD OF ITS HIGHEST PAID SCREEN TALENT
he great reveal of the salaries of the BBC’s highest-paid stars has, for the most part, been grim fun. Should we not cheer that public sector workers are paid so generously? And can Alan Shearer’s most obvious of observations really be worth up to £450,000 (Dh2.2 million) a year? How many Clare Baldings could you get for one Gary Lineker? (Nine.) Who — if you don’t live in Northern Ireland — has heard of Stephen Nolan? (He’s a BBC Radio Five Live and BBC Northern Ireland presenter who earns £400,000£449,999 a year.) Wouldn’t the corporation have saved an awful lot of money had Charlie from Casualty (in the £350,000-£399,999 bracket) not survived gunshot wounds, a hostage situation, about 10 heart attacks, being run over by an ambulance and that time the car he was in plunged into the sea?
It has also been awkward and undignified for the stars who have had to defend their huge pay packets — Lineker blamed his agent for doing an agent’s job; the BBC breakfast presenter Dan Walker justified his salary (compared with his colleagues) by pointing out he also had another job as a football presenter. At the corporation, bosses must have been awaiting the onslaught while celebrity agents were “seething” at the disclosures.
And so we now know exactly how much of our licence fee supports men such as Chris Evans, Graham Norton and, inexplicably, Nick Knowles. Because it is mostly men. If there is a serious point to the BBC’s peek behind the pay packet, it’s what it may tell us about how the broadcaster views women. Just one-third of the highest-paid are female, and the top seven earners are men. Only two women — presenters Claudia Winkleman and Alex Jones — earn more than £400,000 (12 men do).
Institutional sexism
We are talking about only 96 unusual people here — the number of people who appear on air for the BBC who earn above £150,000 — but does it say something about institutional sexism at the corporation? Yes, says Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society. “What we’re seeing is the undervaluing and also the underrepresentation of women, both of which contribute to the gender pay gap. What does that tell us about the pay gap across the BBC as a whole? What are they doing to enable women to progress to senior management roles? How are they paying their lowest-paid workers, and how many women are concentrated there?”
Miriam O’Reilly, the broadcaster who won an ageism case against the BBC in 2011, after she was sacked from Countryfile, says: “Pay disparity goes across the corporation.” O’Reilly says that disparity in pay could be put down to the old idea within the BBC “that somehow men were more valuable because they brought more gravitas and credibility to news. I think we have a historical legacy here; that attitude has to change”.
It has been a difficult day for the BBC and its highest-paid employees. Individuals have been attacked, and politically it has become the latest way to bash a corporation already beleaguered by threats to its future. “The BBC really is a gem and I get angry at the way this government is assaulting it,” says O’Reilly, who now presents a show on Channel 5. “But I do think it has to get its house in order on not just pay disparity, [but] on ageism, on sexism. It wouldn’t have to face storms like this if it did the right thing by people.”