A wave of women's anger: how the BBC's gender pay gap war exploded with Carrie Gracie's public resignation

Carrie Gracie’s public resignation on Sunday was an explosion in the gender wage gap war at the BBC. Insiders at Broadcasting House tell a tale of a divided corporation and a ‘corrosive’ atmosphere
Paul Dallimore
Charlotte Edwardes10 January 2018

It’s hard to imagine how Carrie Gracie, the BBC’s first China editor, felt when the corporation’s top salaries were published last summer and it was shown that North America editor Jon Sopel was paid 50 per cent more than her. “Livid doesn’t cover it,” says one colleague. “It was a kick in the teeth,” says another. After all, a specific condition of taking the job in Beijing (and she’d turned it down multiple times) was the assurance that she “must be paid equally with my male peers”.

Instead she was paid £135,000 while Sopel was paid “up to £250,000”. There was a similar pay discrepancy between the two other international editors: Katya Adler, Europe editor, was level-pegging with Gracie, while Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen was paid “up to £200,000”. Two women versus two men — with their salaries an explosion apart.

Last Sunday, after six months of “trying to resolve the situation”, Gracie “cracked”. Her resignation — part open letter; part hand grenade lobbed through the revolving doors of Portland Place — expresses her rage at the corporation’s inertia in dealing with the gender pay gap.

“The Equality Act 2010 states that men and women doing equal work must receive equal pay,” she wrote. They had offered her “a big pay rise” — indeed, a pay rise the size of some colleagues’ annual salary — but it “remained far short of equality”. Gracie’s view is that men’s salaries needed to come down to create parity.

There followed a brief intermission of comic BBC surrealism (what employees shorthand “all very W1A”). Gracie presented the Today programme on Monday but was unable to comment as news of her resignation dominated the show. Impartiality rules meant Winifred Robinson was replaced in her slot presenting You and Yours after publicly showing support for Gracie. And BBC news reporter Dan Johnson tweeted that he’d been asked to stand in the cold outside his own office “waiting to throw questions at my own bosses about equal pay”. He added: “The newsdesk must really like me.”

But the hilarity was short-lived. Gracie’s case highlights a corporation-wide issue: nearly 200 women in news and current affairs, from senior star journalists to producers and editors, are in a rolling boil of complaints or grievance procedures over equal pay. At least 10 have sought the advice of law firms such as Mishcon de Reya. Morale is said by both male and female employers to be “terrible” and the atmosphere “corrosive”.

So serious is the current “wave of women’s anger” that one female programme editor compared it with the magnitude of the Savile saga in 2012.

“Like Jimmy Savile, it’s something that happened a while ago, was allowed to happen, shouldn’t have happened,” she says. “And now no one seems to know what to do.”

Well, what can they do? Employees are split — and not just down gender lines. There are those who want the issue of “illegal” inequality in pay to be addressed immediately, saying that if it’s not, the corporation faces a ruinous class action because “Where does it stop? What do you do about back pay, pensions, the women who might have been on freelance contracts versus men on staff contracts?”

Women in this camp feel they have been fobbed off repeatedly over the past six months. They are furious, claiming that the corporation has not only refused them pay parity but has refused to even acknowledge a real issue with gender pay.

“The BBC wouldn’t talk to us about ‘equal pay’; they would only talk about ‘fair pay’,” says one presenter involved in the dispute.

Speaking out against the pay gap: Carrie Gracie 
PA

Added to which, the BBC’s long-mocked slowness to act — “It’s an oil tanker, not a speedboat”— has made those in grievances feel “exhausted”.

Yesterday pressure was piled on the BBC in Parliament. On his first day as Culture Secretary, Matthew Hancock answered an urgent question on Gracie’s resignation.

BBC Pay roll - in pictures

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“This isn’t just a matter of levelling women’s pay up — it’s a matter of pay equality,” he said. “Some men at the BBC are paid far more than equivalent public services. The BBC have begun to act, and I welcome that. But more action is needed — especially when the BBC foreign editors can earn more than Her Majesty’s ambassadors in the same jurisdiction.”

Management says it is trying to act but that the transition period is complicated and will be “painful”. It is frustrated too: “We’ve been told by the Government in two successful licence deals to get talent money down,” says a senior figure. “So people aren’t given increases but you end up with this odd pattern where some people are on historically large amounts and new people come in for less money.”

As many new appointments are women, in order to address the gender balance across the BBC, women appear to be given lower salaries than men who have been at the corporation for a while, says management.

But this refusal to admit that there has been any systemic gender pay discrimination makes those involved in actions enraged.

It’s “institutional gas-lighting”, says one employee. Another says, “This denial has had a corrosive effect on women’s self-esteem. You’ve been told ‘no’ so many times that there’s no inequality, you think you’re going mad. And so people go to lawyers to be told, ‘No you’re not going mad, this is happening.’”

It won’t help that management describes those seeking legal advice as essentially obstructive. “It’s harder to [resolve] this once everyone has fallen out with each other and gone legal,” one senior management figure told me.

Nor will their seeming intransigence over explaining pay differences.

A major point in Gracie’s letter is that while refusing to match her pay to her male colleagues, the BBC also refused to explain any difference between their roles that accounted for the shortfall.

The senior management figure attempted to explain these. “Washington has always been the bigger job — no doubt about that,” says the source, adding that China and Europe are recently created positions. Sopel’s “deal” was negotiated “in the Noughties, when salaries were at a high watermark”.

“You can’t say to Jon, ‘Fine, your salary is now at £150,000 because everybody else’s is,’” the source adds, because that would be illegal.

But others — including, it might be argued, Hancock — believe this is the only way to effect change in a hurry.

“Management will push back and use the fact that it is BBC audiences’ money for as long as possible,” says the senior female presenter. “Unless they start cutting men’s pay — essentially what Carrie seems to be suggesting — they can’t get parity. The savings that the organisation needs to make over the next couple of years are huge without any of these cases.

“I don’t know how they are going to do it,” she adds. “Being in BBC management right now must be the worst job in the world.”

So what if the BBC is sued over equal pay? I ask senior management. “We will say if it goes to a legal process. There are objective reasons why those salaries are paid differently. I would imagine Carrie would disagree with that but that is a classic thing that gets argued the whole time in terms of equal pay. It’s not that you have to pay people the same; it’s that you have to have justification for any differences.”

I put this to a female presenter who has had experience of working in both Washington and Beijing. She responds with a long sigh.

“I have reported from both and I can tell you in a split second which is easier. There is nothing easy about reporting in China. It’s isolated, the language is hard, questions must be submitted by fax a month in advance, you’re constantly watched, the authorities actively obstruct you.”

Even male correspondents admit, “It’s quite hard to argue that the Washington job is materially harder or somehow more senior than the China job, even if the traditional hierarchy at the BBC has dictated that Politics, North America and Economics are the plum jobs.”

Many say the slowness of “BBC bureaucracy” to deal with pay discrepancies even before publishing them in July is partly to blame for the current crisis. Since then the approach appears to have been inconsistent, switching between strategic “sensible management” and the desperate chucking out of cash to solve problems on a case-by-case basis.

In cases such as Adler’s, they have offered huge uplifts in a cost-cutting climate. “Not what might be described as ‘good for morale,” says one newsroom staffer.

It’s been going on for “months and months,” says another, who describes the human resources department as “utterly overwhelmed.”

Management says it will not put up pay “overall” but “negotiate men down and get men to move on.” But, they admit, “it’s hard yards. It’s hard yards on both sides.

“By 2020, if we can get to 50-50 with gender and people from diverse backgrounds, then that would feel like something which people would say was market-leading.”

Perhaps, the source adds, “when other companies publishing their gender pay it will highlight suddenly the BBC at 10 per cent doesn’t look so bad.”

With lawyers boxing in management on both sides, it’s hard to see beyond the impasse. Some have high hopes for a meeting between those BBC women who are leading the charge against gender inequality and the director general Sir Tony Hall next week.

Others are placing a lot on the shoulders of Fran Unsworth, who recently took over from James Harding (who, according to one colleague, left in part because of the “mess”).

“James Harding used to say he didn’t know which of the BBC levers worked: he would pull one and nothing would happen. Perhaps Fran can find the ones that work.”

Last night she sent the newsroom an email saying: “BBC pay equality is vital.” Well, it’s a start.

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