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| Carrie Gracie’s dispute with the BBC isn’t about money – it’s about integrity | Carrie Gracie’s dispute with the BBC isn’t about money – it’s about integrity |
| (25 days later) | |
| Carrie Gracie is brilliantly knowledgeable about China and its affairs, the fraught and complex field that she has explained and interpreted for the benefit of the rest of us for most of her professional life. She also has a reputation as a generous and supportive colleague. It is because of both those invaluable qualities that she has resigned from her job as China editor because her employers will not pay her at the same rate as they pay the handful of men who do a similarly challenging and important job. She has resigned because she refused to go on colluding – as she put it in an interview with BBC Woman’s Hour – with the BBC’s dishonesty about its failure to give women and men equal pay for equal work. | Carrie Gracie is brilliantly knowledgeable about China and its affairs, the fraught and complex field that she has explained and interpreted for the benefit of the rest of us for most of her professional life. She also has a reputation as a generous and supportive colleague. It is because of both those invaluable qualities that she has resigned from her job as China editor because her employers will not pay her at the same rate as they pay the handful of men who do a similarly challenging and important job. She has resigned because she refused to go on colluding – as she put it in an interview with BBC Woman’s Hour – with the BBC’s dishonesty about its failure to give women and men equal pay for equal work. |
| Gracie resigned because the BBC will not pay her the same rate they pay the few men with similarly challenging jobs | Gracie resigned because the BBC will not pay her the same rate they pay the few men with similarly challenging jobs |
| Collusion is a powerful word with an unpleasant echo of bad people working together for bad ends. It is precisely the technique that managements all over the world use to exploit women. Gracie was recruited to the job – and recruited is the word: they sought her out, because she had all the talent and skills the BBC needed to cover the huge, difficult international and domestic story of the rise of China. One of the conditions she set for taking it was equal pay with the corporation’s other international editors, familiar names including Jon Sopel in Washington and Jeremy Bowen in the Middle East. | Collusion is a powerful word with an unpleasant echo of bad people working together for bad ends. It is precisely the technique that managements all over the world use to exploit women. Gracie was recruited to the job – and recruited is the word: they sought her out, because she had all the talent and skills the BBC needed to cover the huge, difficult international and domestic story of the rise of China. One of the conditions she set for taking it was equal pay with the corporation’s other international editors, familiar names including Jon Sopel in Washington and Jeremy Bowen in the Middle East. |
| Last summer, the government forced the BBC to publish which of the familiar names on radio and TV earned over £150,000. The results exposed an astonishing pay gap. They also showed Gracie that her employers had misled her. She was not being paid equally with men doing a similar job. | Last summer, the government forced the BBC to publish which of the familiar names on radio and TV earned over £150,000. The results exposed an astonishing pay gap. They also showed Gracie that her employers had misled her. She was not being paid equally with men doing a similar job. |
| In the open letter she published on Sunday night, Gracie sets out all her efforts to get her bosses to do what they had originally promised her, the lengths she went to and their failure to respond adequately. Instead, they prevaricate and procrastinate, offer her a pay rise that still would not have delivered parity, and repeatedly fail to believe her warnings that she would resign if they did not treat her complaint seriously. They treated her, it seems to me, the way they would treat a man. They thought they could buy her off; they behaved as if they were two sides in the familiar old dance routine, the negotiation for a bigger pay cheque. They thought that the reputational hazard she was running – and make no mistake, she does risk her reputation however wrong that is – would scare her away from the fight. | In the open letter she published on Sunday night, Gracie sets out all her efforts to get her bosses to do what they had originally promised her, the lengths she went to and their failure to respond adequately. Instead, they prevaricate and procrastinate, offer her a pay rise that still would not have delivered parity, and repeatedly fail to believe her warnings that she would resign if they did not treat her complaint seriously. They treated her, it seems to me, the way they would treat a man. They thought they could buy her off; they behaved as if they were two sides in the familiar old dance routine, the negotiation for a bigger pay cheque. They thought that the reputational hazard she was running – and make no mistake, she does risk her reputation however wrong that is – would scare her away from the fight. |
| But Gracie could not have been more explicit that it was not about the level of her pay (she thinks top pay at the BBC is too high. No wonder the bosses find her hard to deal with); it was about the principle, the one about which the corporation chunters on in such a self-congratulatory way: equality. Except the BBC repeatedly confuses equal pay, a job-specific definition, with the gender pay gap, the difference between pay in any given group of workers, which is entirely irrelevant to Gracie’s case. | But Gracie could not have been more explicit that it was not about the level of her pay (she thinks top pay at the BBC is too high. No wonder the bosses find her hard to deal with); it was about the principle, the one about which the corporation chunters on in such a self-congratulatory way: equality. Except the BBC repeatedly confuses equal pay, a job-specific definition, with the gender pay gap, the difference between pay in any given group of workers, which is entirely irrelevant to Gracie’s case. |
| Gracie, as the BBC ought to realise but doesn’t, is doing them the service of treating them with just the kind of integrity and forensic reporting skills that she brings to her journalism. She is hunting down the facts, setting them in the legal context, reviewing the application of the law in employment tribunals, and shining a laser beam of light into the murky and secretive world of BBC pay policy. She is doing it because she is a very very good journalist. But she is also doing it because she believes in solidarity. She thinks that as a leader, she owes it to the younger women with whom she works. She thinks that as the employee of a public broadcaster that she believes is a great organisation, it is her responsibility to stop it doing something stupid and wasteful, which is (among other things) what resisting the 200 or so equal pay claims that are being levelled against it would amount to. | Gracie, as the BBC ought to realise but doesn’t, is doing them the service of treating them with just the kind of integrity and forensic reporting skills that she brings to her journalism. She is hunting down the facts, setting them in the legal context, reviewing the application of the law in employment tribunals, and shining a laser beam of light into the murky and secretive world of BBC pay policy. She is doing it because she is a very very good journalist. But she is also doing it because she believes in solidarity. She thinks that as a leader, she owes it to the younger women with whom she works. She thinks that as the employee of a public broadcaster that she believes is a great organisation, it is her responsibility to stop it doing something stupid and wasteful, which is (among other things) what resisting the 200 or so equal pay claims that are being levelled against it would amount to. |
| In a situation that ought to be but I hope isn’t beyond parody, Gracie herself was presenting the BBC Today programme on Radio 4, simultaneously the subject and the object of one of the biggest stories of the day. With Oprah Winfrey’s overnight speech at the Golden Globes casting an extra depth of meaning on Gracie’s struggle, her calm, articulate words should have left the entire upper echelons of the corporation banging their heads on their desks at what they have managed to achieve. | In a situation that ought to be but I hope isn’t beyond parody, Gracie herself was presenting the BBC Today programme on Radio 4, simultaneously the subject and the object of one of the biggest stories of the day. With Oprah Winfrey’s overnight speech at the Golden Globes casting an extra depth of meaning on Gracie’s struggle, her calm, articulate words should have left the entire upper echelons of the corporation banging their heads on their desks at what they have managed to achieve. |
| In her only comments on the Today programme, Gracie said she hoped she wouldn’t be remembered as the woman who complained about money, but as a great journalist and China expert. She is proving that they are two sides of the same invaluable coin. | In her only comments on the Today programme, Gracie said she hoped she wouldn’t be remembered as the woman who complained about money, but as a great journalist and China expert. She is proving that they are two sides of the same invaluable coin. |
| • Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist | • Anne Perkins is a Guardian columnist |