How can PwC conclude there was no gender bias in salaries of BBC staff (BBC backlash as pay review rejects claims of gender bias, 31 January) if elsewhere it concludes that the BBC failed to be open and transparent in pay structures? These conclusions appear contradictory. Good practice in salary structures requires employers to justify seemingly discriminatory decisions. It might just be possible to argue that similar roles (eg China/North America correspondent) require differential pay scales because they require different skills, or time commitment, or experience. These differences, if they existed, would have to be carefully identified, evaluated, analysed and regularly reviewed for bias and open to scrutiny from those individuals affected, in order to be transparent.
If the BBC failed in this critical area, then any reasonable person would conclude there had been gender bias.
Lesley Kant
Norwich
• Many women will be very angry at the findings of the PwC report for the BBC. It seems that nothing has been learned from the extensive research carried out in numerous studies, mostly by women academics, including me, since the early 1980s. Too much weight given to the “prominence and profile of certain individuals” is not just happenstance. The fact that these individuals were all men was a result of previous, entrenched sexism.
Part-time work is often cited as a reason for low pay for women. But men, for example some of our MPs, who do part-time jobs are often extremely well paid. The jobs “chosen” by women are often badly paid not for any objective reason, but because it is women who do them. The practice in professional occupations of using a person’s existing salary as the basis of remuneration in a new post also perpetuates inequality. The factors which give men an advantage in the first place are then used to justify further advancement. There are many factors apart from overtly sexist attitudes that perpetuate the status quo. Perhaps we need a concept like that proposed in the Macpherson report in relation to racism: institutional sexism.
After a long and very difficult three-year struggle I won an an equal pay claim against my employer 17 years ago. I am dismayed that we still need to do this. The law is not working.
Dr Lorna Chessum
Brighton
• In the 1990s the civil service we worked for graded every job. That grade attracted a pay level determined by the job, not by the incumbent. A male human being, a female human being or a hermaphrodite Martian all got the same rate for that job. There were plenty of opportunities for dispute, such as whether foreign editor for China was the same level of job as that for Andorra. But there were agreed procedures for the unions to challenge and agree gradings regardless of the personal characteristic of the potential incumbents, be they genderal, racial, sexual orientation or whatever.
This still meant that women on average earned less than men overall because of the gender bias in promotions, but that too was contested. It is strong unions that are the bastion against employers abusing people who are deemed to have some sort of weakness in the labour market, be that their gender or their ethnicity. It is the denigration and demotion of unions that lies behind the BBC’s shambles of grace and favour promotion and payment for individuals on a whim.
Mary Pimm and Nik Wood
London
• It’s good to learn that the discrepancies between men’s and women’s pay at the BBC are not the result of gender bias. Can PwC reassure us there is no gender bias in its own gender pay gap of 33% of mean hourly pay, compared with the BBC gap of 10.7%?
Ros Campbell
Leeds
• When are we going to have salary comparisons between BBC staff and other broadcasters? Surely more relevant than that of an ambassador or even a prime minister?
Helen Beioley
Stroud, Gloucestershire
• By all means bash the BBC over its gender inequality regarding pay, but why scarce any mention of those inequalities in commercial media and the corporate world in general? Let’s not fall for the argument that the BBC is spending public money and so is different. Pray, tell us, whence derives the money for commercial channels and other businesses? Directly or indirectly, from the public as consumers – after all, whether we’re in the public or private sector, there is no magic money tree.
Peter Cave
London
• Surely the best way to root out gender pay differences is to follow the Scandinavian example and make everyone’s tax return publicly available under freedom of information. No need for yet more expensive and ineffective half measures. Pay equality would become simple and self-policing.
Peter Fellows
Bradford
• The Guardian’s excellent coverage of the BBC equal pay row is still missing an angle. It is presenting the protest against the BBC’s pay practices as a battle between women and patriarchal bias. But what about all the men who also oppose this embedded discrimination? While the issue is sex discrimination, support for the women’s cause is not limited to women. This is an old problem in reporting and talking about such cases and risks entrenching divisions even more.
Hester Brown
London
• The BBC continues to make the controversy over pay more not less complex by focusing on individuals rather than structure. Many public (and some private) organisations addressed this issue at the time of the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, and achieved success by attaching salaries or salary bands to posts rather than relying on individual negotiations. One obvious example is teaching, where there was open discrimination between the genders, and even a union, the National Association of Schoolmasters, whose main purpose was to campaign for this inequality to continue.
Is it not possible for the BBC to devise a pay structure in which salaries are openly attached to posts? It would not prevent the “high-profile” people being appropriately paid to have a range – eg from presenter to principal presenter to chief presenter – each with its known salary/range, and the “stars” who have other high-profile on-screen roles would be paid the publicly known rate for those additional jobs. Secrecy has bedevilled the present mess and staff in other publicly funded organisations in which the value of all posts is public knowledge will be looking on with bemusement.
Geoff Morris
Cambridge
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