The BBC has announced its salaries, and it is apparent that it systematically pays women less than men for their "talent".
There are some valid objections you could make and they go like this:
"Talent at the BBC gets paid too much" - you could make this argument, and the counter to it is that the BBC is competing in a market where it needs to pay what is appropriate. You can choose which is right - you could argue (in my opinion rightly) that I could read an autocue just as well as the average BBC newsreader. But there's a counter to it.
"The men at the BBC should be paid less, not the women more" - you may be right, see my comments about the market, above.
"Nurses deserve more than Charlie from Casualty" - you may be right, but we can't afford to pay them it. There's thousands of nurses and only one Charlie from Casualty.
"It's wrong that men should earn more than women for doing the same job." Yeah, that's unarguable. Consder this. The Church of England pays women bishops the same as men bishops. They pay women priests the same as men priests. More women are Self-Supporting, which opens up all sorts of disussion, and there's still catching up to do in numbers for bishops, but for the same job, men and women get paid the same. Likewise the Methodists and the URC. And the Methodists have been ahead for years. I'm sure that once the Catholics have a woman as Pope, she'll get paid the same as the male Pope.
The BBC, in short - that bastion of equality, progressiveness, fairness and all the rest - is way behind the churches. Just as it was behind the Anglicans (and miles behind the Methodists) in having a female bishop / superintendent / Time Lord. The Church of England - ahead of the BBC in equality since 2013.
Yes - as a female associate priest I work for the C of E and as a self supporting minister get paid nothing - exactly the same as a male self supporting minister. However, in my diocese self supporting ministers are not able to claim a fee for occasional offices whereas in many dioceses NSM's are paid a fee for funerals and weddings. So equal as far as gender is concerned but unequal between different dioceses.
ReplyDelete