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| BBC pay review claims 'no evidence of gender bias' | BBC pay review claims 'no evidence of gender bias' |
| (about 1 hour later) | |
| Director general admits BBC has ‘real issues to tackle’ after corporation criticised over lack of transparency | Director general admits BBC has ‘real issues to tackle’ after corporation criticised over lack of transparency |
| Graham Ruddick Media editor | Graham Ruddick Media editor |
| Tue 30 Jan 2018 11.52 GMT | |
| First published on Tue 30 Jan 2018 10.41 GMT | |
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| A review of on-air pay at the BBC has claimed there is “no evidence” of gender bias in pay decisions at the broadcaster, despite the equality row that has rocked the organisation since last summer. | A review of on-air pay at the BBC has claimed there is “no evidence” of gender bias in pay decisions at the broadcaster, despite the equality row that has rocked the organisation since last summer. |
| Accountancy firm PwC, which produced the report, claimed there was “anomalies that need addressing” in relation to pay but blamed this on lack of clarity and openness, and financial constraints in the BBC over the last decade, rather than gender bias. | |
| The findings relating to gender are likely to frustrate women who have been campaigning for equal pay at the broadcaster. | |
| In response to the report, the BBC said it had already resolved more than half of 230 individual cases raised so far relating to pay equality and would deal with the rest by the summer. | |
| The broadcaster also revealed a five-point plan designed to fix issues raised by the PwC report, which revolves around being more transparent about what it pay staff. | |
| The plan includes pay cuts for some high-profile men as well as pay rises for some male and female presenters, a new criteria for pay based on skills, experience and audience impact, publishing the pay range for “virtually every job” at the BBC so that staff know what their peers are being paid, a review of career progression and working practices for women, and acceleration plans to achieve a 50/50 representation of men and women at the BBC by 2020. | |
| Tony Hall, the director general of the BBC, said: “Today’s report does not find evidence of gender bias in decision-making, but it shows that we have real and important issues to tackle, particularly in some areas of news and current affairs, and I’m determined to get it right. The plans we’re setting out today go further and are more important steps in modernising the BBC and making it fairer. | |
| “We’ve already made an important start. We’re addressing unfairness in individuals’ pay and want to close the gender pay gap and have women in half of our on-air roles by 2020. Those are big, bold commitments I’m really serious about.” | |
| Women at the BBC have already said they have no confidence in the review and that they have been excluded from the process. | |
| In evidence submitted to MPs on the influential DCMS committee ahead of a hearing on Wednesday, the BBC Women campaign group called for an apology, back pay and pension adjustments from the BBC for breaking equality laws. | |
| BBC Women, which is made up of more than 170 presenters and producers including Jane Garvey, Mishal Husain and Victoria Derbyshire, submitted 14 examples of women being paid less than men for the same job or being on inferior contracts without benefits such as sick pay or maternity leave. An unnamed national radio presenter said a manager had told her that “the BBC doesn’t do equal pay” and that she was being “aggressive” for raising the subject. | |
| The written evidence also claimed there had been “veiled threats to female staff about the subject of equal pay. It said: “While individual BBC managers have been supportive there is still a bunker mentality in some quarters and women have experienced veiled threats made against them when they raised the subject of equal pay.” | |
| The PwC report analysed 824 on-air staff at the BBC on news, radio, the World Service, local news, and sport. It found there was a gender pay gap of 6.8% in this group, lower than the 9.3% for the rest of the BBC, but that there were more men than women in the upper half of the pay distribution. | |
| PwC said it had performed a “detailed analysis and a thorough equal pay sampling exercise” on gender equality and found where there were differences between men and women in the same role it was “typically driven by material and justifiable factors unrelated to gender”, such as level of experience, skills and “market influences”. | |
| It added: “Not everyone is paid the same, and in some cases men and women in comparable roles are paid differently. While there are some differences to address, we have not seen anything in our work which leads us to believe this is as a result of gender bias in the setting of pay.” | |
| BBC | BBC |
| Gender | Gender |
| The gender gap | The gender gap |
| Women | Women |
| news | news |
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