Some people are certainly being paid a lot by the BBC, quipped a variety of Twitter wags on Wednesday, but at least the corporation is doing its bit to drive this down by employing a female Doctor Who. Like all the best, bitter jokes, this has a kernel of truth at its heart. There is one debate to be had about whether anybody is worth the £2.2 million paid to the undeniably talented Radio 2 breakfast DJ Chris Evans. Regardless of one’s conclusions, there is a completely different debate to be had over whether Claudia Winkleman, host of Strictly Come Dancing, should be earning about 25 per cent as much. The enormous disparity is not only embarrassing for the BBC but also clearly ridiculous.
As of last year, the Office for National Statistics calculated that, on average, full-time female employees earn 9.4 per cent less than their male counterparts. With some variance, this gap is at its smallest at the start of a working life and its largest towards the end. As the careers of women progress, they tend to progress less fast when it comes to money.
Stark figures do not tell the whole story. An obvious factor in pay disparity is motherhood, with the gap in gross earnings surging when women hit their late 20s. Many high-earning professional mothers go part-time, with the pay gap for part-time workers in their 30s actually working in reverse. PayScale, an American data firm that studies global wages in depth, disagrees with the oft-held contention that women are less likely to ask for pay rises, suggesting that both genders do so with similar frequency.
When men and women can be identified doing clearly identical jobs at clearly identical levels, the gender wage gap can appear to diminish. Yet even classifying jobs as comparable is highly contentious. Often it is the product of deeply embedded assumptions, which themselves embody much of the problem.
At the BBC, for example, neither Jenni Murray nor Jane Garvey (who present Woman’s Hour on Radio 4) made the list of highest paid. At the heart of the gender pay gap, at the BBC and elsewhere, may be a broad and often unthinking presumption that the job of hosting Woman’s Hour is less important than the work done by Chris Evans. The fact that only seven chief executives in the FTSE 100 are women is not an excuse for the pay gap problem. It is the same problem.
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Officially Britain’s pay gap is shrinking, albeit almost imperceptibly. Studying the BBC figures by age, women on the list under 50 are actually outearning their male peers. Time will tell whether this is a result of traditional sexism and ageism working in parallel (as many older female TV stars have often protested it does), or a more positive harbinger of cultural change. By April next year, all British companies with more than 250 employees must disclose average pay for men and women.
Some may regard this as meddlesome, just as the BBC revelations could be considered invasive and humiliating. Shining a spotlight on gender pay disparity, however, can never be the wrong thing to do. Across Britain, companies will be noting the BBC’s embarrassment and wondering if they should be embarrassed, too. The more loudly that high-profile female BBC employees demand pay equality, the better an example they set for all women, from bankers to baristas. It is not only time to mind the gap, but time to close it.