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https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-44779292
Just saw the BBC pay which makes me wonder why the men have been paid so much? I mean what can the men do that the women cannot?
I think there should be a capped of max £350,000 for all as none are really worth that much, including the head of the BBC.
If they don't like that then they can go to other privately funded TV companies etc ...
**** all is the answer - there are sometimes legitimate/explainable reasons for differences in industry, this isn't one of those times and makes the rest of us men look like bellends.
If they don’t like that then they can go to other privately funded TV companies etc
So they will, and the bbc will have no decent talent...
Sexist system where men have run the show for years and don't know how to let go of it.
I'd guess the relevant question here is.. if they replaced these 10 with 10 women, would the same ratings/viewer numbers be achieved?
It's not about replacing one person with another it's about paying people the same rate for doing the same job.
The 'top 10' list is largely a distraction - it's those shows with 'co-hosts' (Radio4 Today etc) where there has been clear gender bias in pay for years that the issue lies.
So they will, and the bbc will have no decent talent…
The BBC might not have decent talent but I am sure the entire UK will have someone with the similar if not better talent.
Why not enlarge the pool of talent to let new people who want to join the sector? Let other have the chance to try out their luck.
If they don't give other a chance how can they know there are no other talent?
They really cannot have a small percentage of their "talents" to take up most of the budget coz that simply is bad management ...
**** all is the answer – there are sometimes legitimate/explainable reasons for differences in industry, this isn’t one of those times and makes the rest of us men look like bellends.
Absolutely. Make us look like donkeys. 🙁
There’s no shortage of “talent” out there to take their place.
Especially at £350k
Whether that talent is “celebrity” enough is probably a bigger factor.
Bejeebus, £350k - that is obscene, but money does not equal being content in life or so I’m led to believe.
It’s not about replacing one person with another it’s about paying people the same rate for doing the same job.
But the job is to get ratings/viewer numbers. My point here (and I don't know the answer) if you replaced a one of those with a woman, and viewer numbers fell, why should they get the same pay? (And that would also point to issue being one of society still needing to move on rather than just the BBC.)
#1 Steve Wright is paid more than £500k, does that not tell you enough about talent and value
Whether that talent is “celebrity” enough is probably a bigger factor.
The "celebrity" is created by them (media) due to exposure so the more they show them (celebrities) the more they become household names. It is all in their own doing ... Celebrity cannot be celebrity if they are not known.
The ‘top 10’ list is largely a distraction – it’s those shows with ‘co-hosts’ (Radio4 Today etc) where there has been clear gender bias in pay for years that the issue lies.
Indeed. Not my bag but aren't Jo Whiley and Simon Mayo now teamed up on R2 with equal headline status?. Will be interesting to see if they get paid the same. It's always muddied by the fact that many of their top talent do multiple shows so two people might not be paid the same because that is all one of them does whilst the other does another show or series. Muddied again because some might appear on the BBC but are paid by a production company making shows for the BBC for some/all of their work.
if you replaced a one of those with a woman
which is why I said that the top 10 is a distraction. Look at the Today Program or PM on Radio 4 - there's a team of presenters and the women are consistently paid less than the men for doing the same job.
The outlier 'stars' are arguably special cases but one might argue that in some cases women don't figure in the list because they've never been given the opportunities they need to get to the place where they would compete on level terms.
btw, I'm all for equalising pay and reducing the gap in all sectors. There should be lower limits and higher limits across the board and between industries and genders.
Most of you would shit the bed at that though! 😆
#1 Steve Wright is paid more than £500k, does that not tell you enough about talent and value
He pulls in millions of listeners in a competitive environment, so probably worth the salary in the commercial sector.
He pulls in millions of listeners in a competitive environment, so probably worth the salary in the commercial sector.
Hmm ... not sure if he is merely the person creating interesting topics or merely delivering the topics as I cannot remember the last time I listened to him. Something about his voice that put me off I think ...
Have they negotiated their salary, and come to a figure that both parties agree on to form a contract and start work?
If they aren't asking for more money, why would an organisation even consider paying more than it can get a "product" for, as that all these presenters are, products.
I get paid more than a female who does the same role, as I have more experience and knowledge of the role and refused the initial offer as I placed a value on my time/skills/experience greater than was I initially offered by the organisation, than she was willing to accept.
Equal pay rubbish. If a woman with more experience and better at the role came in than me, I wouldn't be uppity about her being paid more, I'd be able to see they offered the organisation more, and should therefore be paid more.
Which works if everyone knows what everyone else is paid.
What started this whole thign off was the BBC lying to a woman correspondent that she was beign paid the same as her male counterparts when in fact she was on about half what they were.
Eddie Mair is leaving PM for commercial radio because the way they'd decided to achieve pay parity was to reduce his pay more than they raised the women presenters.
Gary Lineker - £1.75m pa
Makes John Humphrys and Andrew Marr seem good value.
Conjecture - do you think the problem for the BBC is they feel that they have to have a significant ex footballer headline the football coverage. Your average full career footballer is going to have made a nice pile in their playing days to the extent that working for a living needs to be seriously financially worthwhile to keep them from the golf course. That and a significant ex pro footballer capable of stringing coherent sentences together are not easy to come by.
There’s no shortage of “talent” out there to take their place.
Especially at £350k
Whether that talent is “celebrity” enough is probably a bigger factor.
I think this this is a reasonable argument. Changing faces of baseline programmes, such as the news and current affairs, is fraught with curtain twitching and Gammon joints being forced to engage with each other.
Yet the talent and world is moving on rapidly, the current BBC talent pool has already been leaned out by a generation that built Social Media. Is anyone from that sphere interested in entering a behemoth that is rigid and overlaid with 19 governance layers? I think not.
To feed an audience you need to align your feed with faces people recognise. And old has beens are what the BBC promote and pay handsomely for a common focal point to remain stagnant in the ratings, and this is simply a ratings war chasing funding from the Public and Government alike.
The gender pay gap is abhorrent in today’s society, sex should not determine pay talent should.
The figures quoted for some “stars” (like Steve Wright) are throwbacks from an age where agents plundered contracts based on an old boys network and sadly they remain. There is no female presenting a daytime Radio 2 show..... how this has even been overlooked is staggering beyond belief.
The BBC is constantly chasing diminishing returns, both audience and funding.
Its simply about time they had a clear out of the old, refreshed the programme structure and moved into the 20th Century (natch)
I get paid more than a female who does the same role, as I have more experience and knowledge of the role and refused the initial offer as I placed a value on my time/skills/experience greater than was I initially offered by the organisation, than she was willing to accept.
Equal pay is not about paying a woman with less experience the same amount as you with more.
One of the problems is women are less likely to negotiate salary, and if they do they can still be the victim of bias, subconscious or otherwise, if the company values her skills less than they would a man with equivalent experience.
Gary Lineker – £1.75m pa
Yes, that is absolutely excessive to pay him that much.
They don't have to stick to Lineker all the time as there are many others around.
He is just a facilitator in the conversation or analysis and there are other facilitators that can also do that by asking questions in a critical ways.
"It’s not about replacing one person with another it’s about paying people the same rate for doing the same job."
What has that got to do with anything? One person doing the same job as another but does a better job than them should be rewarded and able to command a better salary and deserves to. I get paid more that some of my colleagues doing the same job at the same grade, and some get paid more than me. At my pay grade there is about a £15k pa difference between the bottom and top salaries. Its not exactly unheard of in any profession or any job, just as the salaries get larger so do the differences between people.
For some of the “talent” it is not really clear what they are being paid for.
Take Graham Norton is his pay pure salary or is it pay to a production company to create the program? For some of the others is it a rate for appearances on a show (or multiples there of) or are there other promotional things they need to do we don’t see.
It is very hard to understand the differences between any of the people (within or between genders) and say oh that is obviously because of x talent.
there is no reason for people doing the same job not to be in the same pay band. Identical salaries does not reflect age/experience/skill etc. Same as for any job. If the fresh out with the same job code earns as much as the guy with 10 years experience people get miffed.
trouble is as culture we hide away and are not willing to have our salaries (or taxes) published.
Mind you sexism is rife at my old workplace. The men would not let women carry stuff or build tools in the workshop. Then when they decided to set up monthly cake for team building they made a shortlist of potential organisers which only included the female staff. Once you start looking around you see unequal treatment everywhere.
Mind you sexism is rife at my old workplace. The men would not let women carry stuff
Yeh sexism is rife at my workplace too. The men open doors for the women! pah
Janet
Yeh sexism is rife at my workplace too. The men open doors for the women! pah
Janet
We we all know this is because women’s arms are too dainty to handle the stress when opening doors. 😀
It must be chivalry that excuses not letting women work in the warehouse or tool shop even when it is part of their job. Then they can go on and say well I can do all these other things and all that person can do is paperwork from the desk so I deserve more money...
The list is a joke because so many of the “stars”
are now:
- being paid via BBC worldwide to get round the FOI scope
- being paid by production companies they themselves control (getting round the scope”
- only have part of their pay disclosed (Graham norton etc al)
- the reporter remuneration also strips out allowances and pension contributions which in some cases are substantial.
Some years ago on Question Time David Dimbleby was grilling the then CEO of Sainsburys about his “fat cat” bosses pay. The former was reported at the time to be earning more than £1m a year for reading an auto cue and hosting a weekly argument show whilst the latter was leading a FTSE 100 company and 100,000+ staff.
How Dimbleby kept a straight face is anyone’s guess but if I’d been the Sainsbury’s guy I’d have probably asked him whether his £17k an hour run rate for Questions Time was commensurate with the responsibility.
I think that they could make a lot more in the commercial sector if they wanted to.
My 2p is that if two people are sat in a factory pressing the same button all day, they should be paid the same.
Any job that can be done with various level of performance, pay should reflect that performance.
You could cap all BBC salaries at £250k or whatever, yeah it would be great and ‘fair’ and they’d attract zero big names.
The big players attrach the big audiences. This isn’t some boys club who hold meetings in darkened rooms to keep the glass ceiling in place.
it's a bit like sports or music though isn't it? where the best "talent" can command the most pay. the issue, like most gender pay issues is not one of equal pay for equal work, but one of bias towards men for the more senior, well paid jobs and opportunities for advancement.
Yeah - the thing that muddies the water in relation to the BBC or the entertainment industry more broadly is whether you are giving someone a 'job' or putting them on the bill. If you look at the billing for a concert / music festival or the poster for a movie they're all doing the same job - acting / playing music but some people have top billing and some don't.
Jobs are easily comparable but 'Billing' isn't. If you are the main reason people are watching something and that something is a success then its only fair that you should share in that success rather than be paid the same as someone doing something that isn't as popular.
What doesn't help is while the BBC are required to have open books on pay nobody is asking the same questions of any of the other channels - we don't know what they are offering in comparison and we don't know anything about their pay gaps. Mens pay my be as high as it is because the other channels are offering much more and women's pay may be as low as it its because the competition are offering much less. Would the BBC be over-paying women if they level their pay by putting women's pay at their channel much higher than it is at competing channels?
The whole upset about BBC pay started a while back when Sky / Murdock got upset about how much Jonathan Ross was getting paid. He was getting paid 'a lot' because 90% of all the people watching TV on a Saturday night were watching his show, leaving the remaining primetime audience pretty thinly spread amongst dozens of other channels. But the reason for Murdochs whistle-blowing was because the BBC weren't the highest bidder - they were criticising the BBC for paying him so much but the real story was he'd turned down their higher offer.
Makes John Humphrys and Andrew Marr seem good value
Can't see anything that makes Humphrys good value.
No wonder Gary Lineker & co look so happy, that's an extortionate pay rate compared to mortals on minimum wage!
Can’t see anything that makes Humphrys good value.
My secret vice in the Fortunately podcast with Fi Glover and Jane Garvey. I must be one of maybe 3 heterosexual males that listens to it! Anyway, they are incredibly outspoken and irreverent in their podcast about the BBC in general and the gender pay gap in particular. You would have thought they would be daggers for Humphries but could not be more gushing about how off mic he is the most delightful, warm and caring bloke. Not what I would have expected. Visually he is a dead ringer for my late father which I find quite spooky. Also rate the fact that his background is so incredibly non establishment (humble background, passed 11+ and went to a grammar school but didn't fit in to middle class expectations, left school at 15 and worked his way up from there without and university education).
Interestingly his wiki entry says:-
In 2017, Humphrys earned between £600,000 and £649,999 as a BBC presenter. In January 2018 he took a voluntary pay cut to the £250,000–£300,000 range in the light of the gender pay gap controversy
So I assume that that is either inaccurate or this report is reporting on a period when he is half way between one salary and another.
You would have thought they would be daggers for Humphries but could not be more gushing about how off mic he is the most delightful, warm and caring bloke.
May be true, but on mic - which is what he gets paid for - he is a reactionary ignorant knob.
S’pose it’s easy for some of us to sit here pondering BBC Pay grades, and the recent fallout from its publication.
In the main I think a lot of people in the U.K. feel some sort of affection, nee family connection with it. Partially becuse most U.K. citizens have grown up with it and partially becuse its a very good message spreader, and you could 90% believe that message. But mostly it’s becuse we pay for it out of our own pockets, not as an option but as a requirement by law. So one can claim it’s a media tax imposed by the U.K. Government and as always the case a portion of the public hate taxes, they see no benefit in the immediate whilst forgetting they’re watching Mrs Browns Boys.
So the news reporting became clinical and clean, entertainment reporting became emotional, and the BBCs own publicity became slick and defined.
Its very good at self publicity, it’s had to be. And most believe it’s output.
Ad funded platforms are littered with adverts that 50% of the population find annoying or irrelevant or both, certainly the recent Betting Adverts amongst early TV coverage of football games (England last night was littered with betfair ads) and yet early evening tv is watched by children... and the vulnerable in society. So Betting is becoming “the norm” and being targeted earlier in the evenings. It’s one of the main reasons why I don’t watch ITV.
So our options are digital or pay the BBC and moan about Gender Pay Gaps and Hope the Board does something to mitigate the issues.
Its still a fabulous platform full of talent, long may it continue in a fair manner.
Dont forget they are paying 40% tax on everything over 46K to 150K and then 45% so thats
£104K @ 40% = £41K tax
£200K @ 45% = £90K tax
That should keep a Reaper Drone in air for about 30minutes!
May be true, but on mic – which is what he gets paid for – he is a reactionary ignorant knob.
Yep, I can't stand the Today program, I think Chris Evans has more political integrity than John Humphries.....
I know every single one on the mens list, but only one on the female list. That is why the men are paid more, they are bigger "Stars", "Celebrities", "Names" that draw in bigger audiences. It has naff all to do with ability to present a program.
Whilst a lot of the cost of a TV or radio show might be the 'talent', its by no means the only cost.
I'm working on a BBC documentary at the moment and well over 50% of the production staff are female. Its not evenly distributed, for example the technical team is all men, the PD's are 80%, but the rest from execs to the runners are majority women.
I've no idea what the (male) voiceover celebrity gets paid, but I'd be surprised if the overall wage bill isn't split equally. And the jobs are all advertised as a day rate so everyone is on the same rate as everyone else with that role (except the execs who are probably staff or own shares of the production company).
So one can claim it’s a media tax imposed by the U.K. Government and as always the case a portion of the public hate taxes, they see no benefit in the immediate whilst forgetting they’re watching Mrs Browns Boys.
I was with you up till you mentioned Mrs Browns Boys.
Well, tbh you lost me a bit before that. I used to agree, and think that the BBC was special in terms of journalistic integrity and drama (etc) content, but recently the gap between BBC productions and those on Sky or Netflix has become enormous, and at the same time the news has really gone down the pan. Today is the obvious example - edited by a staunch Tory and populated by clowns like Humphrys and Robinson, but extending beyond that to editorial decisions about what to cover in the main news programmes. I saw an interview on CNN (which I used to regard as utter garbage) with a Palestinian woman who expressed her situation 100x better than anything I have heard on the Beeb, which routinely parrots Israeli propaganda.
At this point I'd be happier if we end the pretence that the BBC is impartial, and give us back our licence fee to spend on porn or propaganda as we wish.