A salary of £2.2m saw Chris Evans top the list of the BBC’s best-paid talent last year, £1.75m saw Match of the Day host Gary Lineker take second place with Graham Norton coming in third bagging around £850,000 in the past financial year. A release of the BBC’s top paid talent showcased a rather large gender pay gap with Claudia Winkleman being the highest paid women on the broadcasting company’s payroll, earning £400,000, around a fifth of the top earning male. The Strictly Come Dancing host came 8th in the salary listings, the top seven spots all being occupied by men.
The list released by the BBC included 96 actors, hosts, DJs, presenters and journalists, only a third of whom were female.
Tony Hall, the General Director of the BBC has spoken in defence of the listed salaries but also agrees that there is more work the BBC needs to do in order to close the gender gap, including plans to have presenting and lead TV roles split equally between men and women by 2020. Hall believes the BBC’s influence in making these changes will have a significant impact on closing the gender pay gap in the media industry as a whole.
The Gender Pay Gap is an issue that transcends the BBC, with it having a presence within many industry sectors across the UK, with the current gap for full-time workers in the UK seeing men earn 9.4% more on average than a female in the same role.
As an employer you have a responsibility towards your workforce to work towards reducing this pay gap, reviewing job roles and their requirements is the first step in this process. Ensure that requirements are based on skill and responsibility, not gender, you could put yourself at risk or breaching discrimination laws. It’s also useful to review your recruitment process, do job specifications offer equal opportunity and training to both genders?
If you would like more information or guidance regarding the gender pay gap, don’t hesitate to get in touch with the HPC team. Give us a call on 0844 800 5932 or email us on help@highperformanceconsultancy.com
If you want to share your views with us on the BBC salaries or your experience with the gender pay gap, drop a comment below or tweet us @HPC_HRservices