The gender pay gap may have gone up, but the fight back for equality is on

This week hasn’t been a great one for women. From the slew of female MPs standing down as a result of a torrent of abuse to the latest round of depressing gender pay statistics released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), the stories of women’s struggles are flowing into the newsroom.

Samira Ahmed is suing the BBC over claims of unequal pay over a period between 2012 and 2018. Ahmed was paid £440 per episode for presenting Newswatch, whereas her male colleague and equivalent, broadcaster Jeremy Vine, was paid £3,000 per episode of Points of View. Both shows are 15 minutes long and focus on audience feedback on the BBC’s programming. Yet where Vine did not write his scripts, Ahmed wrote her own while putting in more hours on the programme and, as she said herself, “It’s likely that Jeremy Vine spends less time in make-up than I do. Women are more likely to be criticised for their appearance on air.” She is claiming just shy of £700,000 in back pay.

The day before Ahmed’s tribunal opened, new figures from the ONS showed that the gender pay gap between men and women in full-time work had increased from 8.6 per cent in 2018 to 8.9 per cent in the year ending April 2019. According to the ONS, this is “not a statistically significant increase”.

I’ll tell you what is significant however: men are still paid more than women, and I’ll be damned if I’ll be hounded into accepting that as a good news story simply because the “full-time pay gap has been on a downward trajectory for decades”.

When all workers are factored in, the gender pay gap stood at 17.3 per cent in 2019, compared with 17.8 per cent in 2018. We can all quit feminism now! Our work here is done, ladies.

Several years ago, I discovered I was being paid roughly 50 per cent less than my male predecessor was. I was doing the same job, I had the same headcount in my department and I had the same responsibilities. Learning of the discrepancy led to a drop in my own personal morale from which I never properly recovered. I wound up leaving soon afterwards. So much of women’s careers can feel out of our own control: just look at the MPs choosing to stand down at the impending election due to, as former Tory and now Lib Dem MP Heidi Allen put it, “the nastiness and intimidation that has become commonplace”.

Research released by the Women and Equalities Committee showed that 86 per cent of women MPs are not confident that appropriate action is being taken to ensure violence and abuse against women in politics is effectively tackled. Two in three female MPs (65 per cent) said that this lack of progress in addressing this abuse “has an impact on their willingness to stand for re-election”, while just one in four male MPs (24 per cent) said the same.

But the fight-back is on. Journalist Carrie Gracie resigned from her position as the BBC’s first ever China editor once she discovered that the corporation’s two male international editors were paid “at least 50 per cent more” than Gracie and Europe editor Katya Adler. Six months later, the BBC apologised and provided £361,000 of back pay, which Gracie donated to the Fawcett Society. She has since returned to the London newsroom and is a regular on-screen presence as well as filling in as a presenter on Radio 4’s Today programme.

An outcome such as this would have been unimaginable even 10 years ago. It hopefully bodes well, not just for the case of Samira Ahmed, but also for the pay packets of all women across the United Kingdom.

We aren’t asking for huge chunks of cash beyond what is reasonable for the effort expended and the responsibility shouldered. Instead, we ask only for a fair amount for the work we do. Oh, and before I forget, it seems like a basic request – but can we also get the same as our male counterparts?