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The BBC is lucky to have such a loyal workforce. How many other organisations caught in the midst of an equal pay row would have some of its best-paid male presenters ride to their rescue by volunteering to take a pay cut?
The salary sacrifices of John Humphrys, Jon Sopel, Huw Edwards, Nick Robinson, Nicky Campbell and Jeremy Vine were a welcome gesture. But they also enabled the BBC to spin the actions of a few individuals as evidence of an institutional commitment to tackling unequal pay between men and women.
That commitment is in doubt – no matter how many times BBC managers profess their desire to right a wrong that they insist does not exist in their organisation.
Most of the BBC’s women employees have stopped short of pillorying their employer publicly but they would be fully entitled to do so given the corporation’s response to their quite reasonable demands for equal pay.
Welcome transparency
The BBC’s proposals today, for instance, include some welcome transparency measures that should help to strip away some of the layers of obfuscation that the corporation has constructed. But alongside it is yet another partial (so that the whole picture is obscured) pay report that uses terms like “anomalies” and the almost Orwellian “pay unfairness” to describe cases of unequal pay.
As for relying on the goodwill of male employees, Women’s Equality Party co-founder Catherine Mayer pointed out this morning that charity must never be confused with equality.
If the media is going to depend on ‘guys doing the right thing’ in order to ensure equal pay, we refuse to see those steps as systematic change.
Media institutions such as the BBC are creating systems which routinely discriminate against women and expecting their own employees to volunteer for pay cuts to clean up their own mess.
Rewarding inequality
Few people have mentioned the obvious: these nice guys are essentially saving the BBC money, by cutting their own pay cheques; they have actually rewarded the BBC’s inequality by saving it hundreds of thousands of pounds.
If this money was to be reinvested into securing greater coverage of women’s sports, or investing in female directors and writers to ensure more genre breaking stories are told, or giving it to the talented women who were robbed of equal pay to begin with, the BBC might be on the right track.
But the BBC has not said anything about how it will use the money.
Same tactics
It seems as if in taking a stand for equality, the presenters who have offered to take a pay cut have actually given the BBC a blank cheque to perpetuate the same tactics over and over.
Equality cannot be dependent on somebody else ‘doing the right thing.’ Women are either entitled to equal pay, equal rights, and equal treatment or else we remain dependent members of society. Institutions such as the BBC should be brought to task for their systematic discrimination, not handed a check.
The Women’s Equality Party seeks to create a society where all people are able to maximise their potential. That can only be achieved when women and men have equal pay – without having to wait for others to help them out.
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