AMM

BBC PAID A WOMAN HALF A MAN SALARY FOR THE SAME JOB AND THOUGHT NO ONE WOULD NOTICE Carrie Gracie spoke fluent Mandarin. Ran the @BBC Beijing bureau. Thirty years of service. One of four international editors at Britain's most prestigious broadcaster. Then the BBC was legally forced to publish salary data in 2017. Gracie looked at the list. Her male counterpart covering North America was on up to £249,000. She was below £150,000. Not even on the published list. Neither was Europe editor Katya Adler. The two women. Funny that. She had explicitly made equal pay a condition of taking the China role. The BBC said yes. Then paid her nearly half anyway and apparently hoped she'd never check. She checked. She asked for equal pay. The BBC, with the confidence of an institution that had been getting away with this for decades, offered her a raise that still left her short. She turned it down. Resigned from the post. Published an open letter to the licence fee payers explaining exactly what their public broadcaster was doing with their money. The BBC's response was to put her through nearly a year of their own internal grievance process. Run by the same institution she was complaining about. Investigating itself. Shockingly, it went nowhere. It took three separate meetings with the Director-General and the concrete threat of an employment tribunal before the BBC caved, issued a public apology, and paid her £361,000 in backdated wages. She gave every single penny to the Fawcett Society (@fawcettsociety). A publicly funded broadcaster. Breaking equality law. Caught red-handed. Dragging a 30-year employee through a year of institutional theatre. Paying up only when a judge became a realistic possibility.