Former BBC foreign correspondent Jane Standley, inspired by the stand taken by Carrie Gracie, has decided to speak out for the first time today about the gender pay discrimination she claims she also faced while working for the BBC. “My own experience of unfair pay was so similar,” Standley told the Observer. “In the end I was just sick of it.”
Standley, 54, worked on the frontline in African hotspots in the 1990s and covered the attack on the twin towers in New York in 2001. She found out she was paid less than her male colleagues, raised the issue, and then got on with the job.
But last Wednesday, when she heard former BBC China editor Gracie’s dramatic evidence to the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport select committee, she decided to give a first-hand account of her own struggle for fair pay.
Winner of the Sony reporter of the year award in 1997, along with several other industry accolades, Standley eventually left the BBC largely as a result of the pay disparity that she had uncovered, after trying in vain to get managers to address it privately.
“My boss actually acknowledged it and told me it was something I had to put up with. I am so angry that things just don’t seem to have changed,” she said on Saturday.
Like Gracie, Standley took calculated risks in search of stories and, in the field, faced some of the worst things humans can do to each other. She had hoped for support back in the news room, but says she found little.
Gracie stood down as China editor last month after what she says were repeated attempts to gain pay parity with male BBC foreign editors, such as Jon Sopel and Jeremy Bowen.
