Here’s a hilarious paradox for you: women are actually to blame for the gender pay gap. That’s right, forget everything you thought you knew about the persistent financial inequality between men and women. It is, actually, like most things, women’s fault. Riddle me this, reader.
This very revelatory and totally game changing news comes to you courtesy of Sir Philip Hampton, the co-chair of a government-commissioned review into increasing the number of women in senior business roles. Excuse me while I…face palm.
Speaking to Rosamund Urwin in the Evening Standard Sir Philip said he had ‘never, ever had a woman ask for a pay rise’ he then went on to say ‘how has this situation arisen at the BBC that these intelligent, high-powered, sometimes formidable women have sat in this situation?’ Answering his own question, he then said ‘they [female broadcasters] are all looking at each other now saying: “How did we let this happen?” I suspect they let it happen because they weren’t doing much about it.’
Tut tut, that’s just typical of women, isn’t it? We rest on our laurels and watch us inequality, sexism and gender bias closes in on us in the form of Chris Evans circling menacingly in a yellow Lamborghini. We’re too complacent to see it coming, and even if we could we’d probably just have another Pinot and worry about what to wear tomorrow anyway. Amirite, ladiezzz?
The BBC pay report (quite rightly) created a bevvy of sound and fury headlines but, let’s be honest, it confirmed what pretty much every woman already knew: men get paid more than women. At the BBC, a supposed bastion of left luvvies, just one-third of the highest paid presenters were women with the entirety of the top 7 of the 96 people on the list were men. More than this there were no black, Asian or minority ethnic (BAME) employees in the top 20.
Think of the BBC as a microcosm of the rest of the working world and media as the rest of the employment market bubbling ferociously at boiling point in full view of the public. As Sky’s political correspondent Lewis Goodall pointed out, pay inequality in Britain isn’t just about gender and race, it’s about class too.
Goodall, who The Debrief has heard is a real whizz with a spreadsheet, ran the numbers and found that three in five of the BBC’s best-paid on-air journalists and presenters went to independent schools. He points out that this means you’re nine times more likely to be a top BBC journalist if you went to a private school and deftly made the point ‘if you’re a working-class girl, the odds are longer still.’
In all the fuss about how much presenters get paid, nobody really paid any mind to the list of senior managers that the BBC also published. Goodall points out that it was, unsurprisingly, dominated by privately educated men (James Purnell, James Harding and Ian Katz). Study after studyhas shown that there is pervasive unconscious bias when it comes to diversity at work: people are more likely to hire in their own image. So, if the managers of a company are, broadly, privately educated men there’s going to be a serious problem throughout the ranks.
When you factor in class, it becomes even more worrying. The idea that women are meant to argue and negotiate for pay is all very well and good, but not everyone feels entitled or confident enough to do so. I’ll come clean about my vested interests in this: I am a state-educated woman who went to Oxford as the first person in my family to go to university and found myself, often, on the outside of a big old insiders' club in which everyone already knew each other.
I then went on to work in politics before joining the BBC (an institution that I’ll defend to my dying breath in spite of its flaws) as a freelance broadcast journalist and producer. Once there, I had to negotiate my pay regularly, on one or two occasions I found out I was being paid less than a male colleague for the same work. He was on a different contract to me, I was assured. It was very, very complicated. Once I actually had my rate reduced and had to argue to be reemployed on the same money as three months earlier. That was awkward and exhausting. Another time, I was fobbed off with excuse after excuse as to why I wasn’t being paid a standard rate that I knew to be standard. In the end, I caved because I was getting nowhere, needed to eat and, more importantly, protect my relationship with the person employing me so I could eat in the future as well.
But, heck, what do I know? Silly, meek, mild, under confident and complacent air head that I am? I am guilty after all, of backing down during pay negotiations because I so desperately need the money full stop that arguing for more feels far too risky. After all, there’s one industry where women get paid more than men: modelling. The only snag is that it’s very difficult to get into and generally, as a career it has a shelf life because you’re out on your ear by 25.
You might have heard about a study which found that women ask for pay increases as often as men but are less likely to receive them when they do. It was published by the University of Wisconsin in 2016 and completely debunked the myth that women lack assertiveness when negotiating their salaries, bucking the thinking that women bear any responsibility for the gender pay gap. The study confirmed that pay gaps are, without a doubt, down to structural biases. Forget about that and listen to Sir Philip. He says it's not the case. He must be right.
You may also have heard that the World Economic Forum has found that there is no country on earth where women make as much as men for the same work. Sir Philip’s definitely the authority on this, though.
When will we women understand? When women in all manner of jobs are paid less than men it’s not because of insidious, inherent sexism or social mobility issues – no, no, no – it’s because we don’t ask to be paid properly. The issue of pay is not at all complicated and enmeshed with class, gender or race.
Sir Philip, with my tongue firmly in my cheek I thank you. Thank you for putting us right. We have, finally, seen the light. Good job we cleared that up. The gender pay gap is as simple as the old adage ‘if you don’t ask, you don’t get’. You’ve got to be on the pitch to score a goal, eh? Tell that to the England Women’s football team, I dare you. There’s also definitely no sexism in sport. None at all.
Like this? You might also be interested in:
Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.