“For presenting a 15-minute show on the BBC News channel, Ahmed was paid £440 ($565). A male presenter, Jeremy Vine, presented a similar 15-minute show on BBC One. He was paid £3,000 ($3,855).”
On a cold November morning, a group of women—and a few men—gathered in front of Holborn tube station, in Central London. At 9 a.m. sharp, two of them linked arms with Samira Ahmed and walked the television presenter down the street to the building where her pay-discrimination case would be heard. It was a gesture of both support and defiance: Over the seven days of hearings, Ahmed took on a British giant.
The fight for equal pay in Britain has been a long and arduous one. By law, British women have been entitled to be paid the same as men for almost half a century—the relevant legislation was passed in 1970. But pay rates still often depend on nebulous criteria such as “experience” or “potential,” or what employees were paid in their last job.
Arguments about pay are so fraught because they are, at heart, arguments about value. Our salaries are a measure of our worth, a crude way of keeping score. Greater transparency forces companies to explain and defend the criteria they are using to decide this value. “Why and how have we arrived at the conclusion that he’s worth six times her?” is how Sam Smethers, chief executive of the Fawcett Society, put it to me.
Smethers believes that merely revealing the overall picture is inadequate: Women need specific information on their male peers, rather than headline figures across the company. They might suspect they are being underpaid, but have no way to prove it. “You’re stuck with a right [to equal pay] you can’t enforce,” she said. The Fawcett Society is calling for greater pay transparency at the individual level, backed by penalties for employers who do not cooperate.
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