Let's not lose sight of the BBC's shameful ethnic pay gap

As the row over the BBC’s gender pay gap escalated last month, I found it fitting that most of my conversations were taking place in a very specific forum. A few years ago, in response to the paucity of senior female journalists of colour, and the sense we were being excluded from other gender-focused networks, we set up our own group. It’s informal – not limited to ethnic minority women, but women of all backgrounds who are committed to equality – and for the last few weeks it has been abuzz.

The main debate has not been the existence of a gender pay gap – that came as a surprise to no one – but how a renewed focus on gender inequality can still leave questions of race inequality languishing in the dark. Take, for example, the fact that so many senior BBC women felt content to sign their name to a letter calling for immediate action on gender disparity by the BBC without so much as mentioning the ethnic pay gap. This felt like feminism taking one gigantic leap backwards – to the 1980s, perhaps, when Kimberlé Crenshaw so famously coined the term “intersectionality” to highlight the fact that “women of colour are invisible in plain sight”.

Ethnic minority journalists are in a specifically bad place when it comes to BBC pay parity. Among those earning the top 24 salaries there was not a single ethnic minority person. Of the 10 who did make the list, none were in the top 24. The extent of inequality will be further revealed, no doubt, when World Service salaries are revealed.

An internal review of pay disparity between the domestic BBC and its World Service was due in the spring, but is yet to be published. The Guardian reported earlier this week that not a single presenter at the World Service is expected to earn over £50,000. If that sounds like a perfectly decent salary for a star news anchor, compare it with the £600,000 Huw Edwards takes home every year.

The apparently low pay of World Service journalists needs to be taken in the context not just of a service that, over the past five years, has increased its global audience by 80 million, but also one that is regularly drawn upon to give more credibility to the BBC’s poor performance on increasing diversity. Every time the BBC is asked for its diversity stats, it rolls out the relatively high number of BME staff at the World Service, bumping its overall figure up to 14%. This looks and feels like bulking up diversity on the cheap. “Fake diversity”, as Lenny Henry said.

One of the best articles about this was published in the Financial Times by leader writer Abhishek Parajuli, who I had the pleasure of meeting, coincidentally, at the BBC recently. He and I were on the sofa discussing various Sunday morning issues with two talented anchors, Sean Fletcher – who is black – and Emma Barnett – who is female, and whose names, incidentally, were both conspicuously absent from the list of best-paid presenters.

Yet as it emerged this week that FT journalists – men and women – are threatening strike action in response to their own gender pay gap, I can’t help but wonder how many non-white journalists are included in their activism, the state of the ethnic pay gap included in their cause.

Part of the problem with all this is that the media organisations reporting the problems of pay equality and intersectional disadvantage have their own crosses to bear. The industry as a whole has intractable problems around diversity. As of 2016, British journalism remained 94% white. There is evidence that things have got worse, not better, that the industry remains “sorely lacking diversity” and that people from non-privileged backgrounds are being priced out.

The number of minority journalists is increasing at entry level, but there are major issues with retention. This is why, when Tony Hall points to entry-level statistics in response to the poor diversity figures at the Corporation, those of us further up know that is not a solution in itself. Who can forget Panorama reporter Raphael Rowe’s farewell email, after being – he said – “pushed out” after 15 years, claiming that diversity at the Corporation was “the worst he had ever known”.

You have to be the greatest athlete of all time, apparently, to garner any significant attention towards the dire state of race equality in the media, and society as a whole. Enter Serena Williams, who in a personal essay this week lamented that black women in America earn 17% less than their white female counterparts. “Even black women who have earned graduate degrees get paid less at every level. This is as true in inner cities as it is in Silicon Valley,” wrote Williams. “We are going to have to fight for every penny.”

There are similar data for the UK – black African women, for example, have seen virtually no progress in closing the gender pay gap between them and white men since the 1990s, which according to the Fawcett Society, still stands at 19.6%.

I noticed that Williams made her remarks about the US pay gap on “Black Women’s Equal Pay Day”. The fact that, in the UK, most of us have never even heard of such a thing, says it all really.

******

One of the most powerful arguments in favour of diversity in journalism is the contribution that people with a wide range of backgrounds and perspectives make to the quality of media output. I seriously doubt, for example, that anyone versed in the social politics of post-imperial India could have produced a piece of journalism as nauseating as the Daily Mail’s recent ode to “A Corner of Wiltshire Where The Raj Never Died”. It tells the story of a “highly intelligent Countess” and her “loyal Indian houseman”. This Indian man, known as “Muthu”, has spent 60 years in servitude to his white, aristocratic mistress, a vocation without which “his life would have little purpose”. I’m confident that anyone with either lived, or learned, experience of the problematic legacy of Empire would have imploded at the sight of this article. It’s one of the best examples of the radical need to diversify newsrooms I think I have ever seen.