LONDON: The 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 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 breakfast sofa 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 — according to one person I spoke to — 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).
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, the 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.” She is concerned about whether it will be properly addressed “on the lower rungs, the people you never hear about but who keep the BBC going”.
O’Reilly says she has “no concern at all about what the stars get paid. They all get paid enough,” but adds 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. The BBC does an extraordinary job, and God knows where we’d be without it, but I do think it has to get its house in order. I think this is an opportunity to say there is an issue, and we have to get to grips with it. This is an opportunity for them to address pay disparity across the BBC.”
Does she think the BBC being forced to reveal star salaries will change the culture at the corporation? “I think it might change what they pay people, but in terms of the sexism that goes on, no, I don’t think it will. I’m always ever hopeful. When I won my ageism case, the BBC talked about a change in culture.” (It was, said the then director-general Mark Thompson, “an important wake-up call”.) “It didn’t happen. I won my case six years ago and in that time, I haven’t seen any noticeable improvements. I’m very sceptical because I feel the BBC uses fine words on this, but I don’t see any evidence that it follows through.”
The BBC’s revelations come at an interesting time for pay transparency and the long-standing aspiration to close the gender pay gap (the Equal Pay Act, which prohibits paying different amounts to men and women doing the same jobs, dates back to 1970). Under new legislation, by next April all companies with more than 250 employees will have to release figures showing their gender pay gap (most will have one). The BBC’s release of its star salaries is unique and not part of this, but it is so far the most high-profile example of how salaries between men and women differ. When companies report their figures, it won’t be obvious which man and which woman is paid what, but it will put a focus on which companies are doing better than others in general terms of how much they pay their male and female employees.
Will transparency lead to the closing of the pay gap? On International Women’s Day in March this year it was reported that, in the UK, women still earn 9.4 per cent less than men. “Transparency is incredibly important and what we have is the culture of pay secrecy in our workplaces,” says Smethers. If a female employee knows a man doing the same or equivalent job is paid more, she is able to challenge that. But what we will have, with the mandatory gender pay reporting, she says, “isn’t real transparency — we won’t know what individuals are earning, we will get average figures. It won’t help individual challenges, but it will force organisations to look at where women and men are and to address the issues. They’re going to think about how much they’re paid and whether women are getting through to senior positions, and what they can do to address that.”
The gender pay gap and equal pay are two different things. At TSB, which released its figures this week (a number of other companies and organisations, such as PricewaterhouseCoopers, Virgin Money and Doncaster council, have beaten the 2018 deadline too), there was a 31 per cent gender pay gap across the company. This doesn’t mean women were paid 31 per cent less than men for the same jobs. “We’ve been explicit about the drivers of our gender pay gap,” says Helen Rose, TSB’s chief operating officer. “For us, that was about getting across to our partners [employees] the difference between an equal pay issue and having a gender pay gap. We don’t have an equal pay issue. We pay equally for people on the same grade. Just 1 per cent of our 31 per cent pay gap comes from [unequal pay]; the remaining 30 per cent comes from the make-up of our workforce.”
Non-senior managers are predominantly women, for instance. “We wanted to be really clear about why we’ve got a pay gap and be overt about saying we’re going to do to address it and report transparently on it. We’re disappointed that more businesses haven’t chosen to publish their gender pay gap, and that’s what we’re calling for.” (At PricewaterhouseCoopers, women’s hourly rate of pay came in at 33.1 per cent lower than men’s; at Virgin Money it was 32.5 per cent lower; and at Doncaster council, 15.7 per cent lower, in each case according to the mean figure.)
Related: Who earns what among BBC’s top talent
Will the BBC’s star salaries be a gamechanger? Smethers isn’t convinced, although she welcomes the focus it brings to the differences in how much many men and women are paid. “If Tony Hall [the director-general] is serious about closing the gender pay gap for women and men on air by 2020 — though you have to address it for all staff — that’s a very bold statement. He’s got to do some pretty radical things.” The BBC is high-profile, and a leader, and that may filter down to other companies.
The fight to close the gap more broadly, across all sectors, is a huge job, and requires major social change. “You’ve got to look at equal value issues,” says Smethers. “You’ve got women in one role paid less than men in another role, and yet you can see they’re of equal value to the organisation. That’s discrimination that has to be rooted out. Then you’ve also got to think about unequal impacts of caring roles. Women often go off on maternity leave and come back part-time. Are they given the opportunity to progress to senior roles on a part-time basis? If not, why not? Are you getting the best people into those roles if you’re screening out a lot of women who can’t do the job because of the hours? You need to redesign the way you think about those jobs.”
Access to better-paid jobs — for instance, in Stem careers — has to be addressed to qualify more young women. “So you’ve got to try to open those roles to women, and that is challenging if you haven’t got enough women coming through the education system,” says Smethers.
What will it mean once gender pay reporting becomes commonplace? There may be legal cases, for a start, if female employees can prove they are underpaid (the BBC could be facing discrimination cases, some lawyers have warned). The gender pay gap in many companies is often unintentional, says Petra Wilton, the director of strategy at the Chartered Management Institute, “but often reflects the lack of balance between men and women in senior management roles and attracting women into better-remunerated roles”.
There is very little disparity among junior managers, she says — around 1 per cent. “As soon as you get to middle management and above, you see men are 40 per cent more likely to be promoted than women, and that’s where the big gap starts creeping in.” At the top, women are paid on average 35 per cent less than men. In terms of how it will work in practice, it’s not about cutting men’s pay to level the field, but about things such as questioning why fewer women make it into the most senior roles. “Shining a light on it means that organisations are now starting to address it. The BBC isn’t alone in terms of revealing gender pay gaps, but it does mean they can start to set targets,” says Wilton.
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 shitstorms like this if it did the right thing by people.”
