BBC Pay Bias

News reports today illustrate the ongoing debate on gender bias in pay within the BBC. Sandi Toksvig reveals she gets less than half the pay Stephen Fry received for QI. Toksvig said she is paid the same as panelist Alan Davies. Some of the online furore generated by these reports seek to justify the differential on the basis of Fry’s service length or state he has more ‘draw’. Whilst such factors almost certainly play a part, I don’t think it really justifies the entire differential. 

The BBC has been shown to have a systemic legacy issue with gender bias in pay. Even if you take the view that Fry may have been overpaid (also a legacy bias) in relation to general market trends, a 50% differential for doing a job with identical role profiles seems excessive.

Part of the issue, I suspect, is an absence of a structured, graded pay scale that is fit for purpose. I worked for British Gas pre floatation and for British Telecoms post floatation. Both were originally part of the Civil Service so are comparable in processes to the BBC. They had effective pay scales that included annual pay surveys and consequential levelling exercises. These helped prevent anomalies at either end of the pay bands. In addition, the unions would survey members after each pay review in order to keep an eye out for gender, age, ethnicity or sexual orientation bias in pay. Dummy job adverts would be posted periodically in order to establish/verify salaries. In short, there are ways of ameliorating the effect of ‘market force’, ‘experience’, or ‘draw’ on pay in order to treat all employees fairly.

As for ‘she/her agent read/signed’ the contract... Well, let me just ask when you last asked colleagues doing the same job as you what they were earning? Most of us in Britain are more closed mouthed about this than we are about our sex lives. Until that changes, certain employers will continue taking the proverbial urine.