[Dave W]

That's why some say the country doesn't have a gender pay gap (because that would be illegal) it has an outcomes gap, because some people make different career choices to others.

Some of those choices (maternity, for example but obviously there are other less common ones) result in interrupted career development and hence reduced pay progression over a full career.

Most employment groupings don't have pay scale increases that continue throughout such career interruptions; very few employers could afford that.

[eltonioni]

I still think a system that values financiers, footballers, entertainers and newsreaders above surgeons has gone deeply wrong.

For newsreaders - offer a salary most of us would be immensely grateful for say £100k, and employ the best applicant.

The system, such as it is, values scarcity at the extremes. In that regard surgeons are well paid whether they are above average or below average. Financiers, footballers and entertainers are generally paid according to their scarcity of their talent and there are a lot of very ordinarily paid people in all those professions.

Where it seems to break down is, like you say, with newsreaders, but maybe they have ended up sat on a studio chair through a career of clever journalism, maybe getting shot at, etc, in which case the scarcity value kicks in again. Would a local newsreader really be able to carry off an interview with a senior politician - I've heard mine and I don't think they could get close to John Humphreys eviscerating Gove or McDonnell. No doubt exceptional surgeons are exceptionally well paid too although again it breaks down because the average surgeon doing appendix removals will be paid much much more than an average journalist who gets to ask the local councillor about drain cleaning.

It's still a struggle to see how Chris Evans gets away with that salary though. He's undoubtedly very talented (not my taste though) but four times more salary than wosserface indicates something not right at Auntie's. As if to underline that the latest reports are that the Beeb are going to kick out the highly paid men rather than pay women better, making equality of outcome the ridiculous objective instead of giving everyone an equal opportunity. Targets met, point missed.

[Charles Hunt]

I don't agree with the dictum that scarce talent deserves high rewards. We are a co-operative society. We need engineers and chemists for clean water and to dispose of wastewater. We need technicians to service these things and keep them operational. We need farmers to provide food. We need builders to provide us with shelter, engineers again, to provide heat and/or cooling and light, doctors and nurses to care for our health. We need dustbinmen (sorry waste re-appropriation and recycling facilitators) we need factories and workers to produce things we need etc etc

Possibly once we have enough of these, adequately remunerated, so that they can own a home and raise a family, then we consider paying inflated sums for un-neccessary talent.

At present I'd prefer 50 nurses to 1 Chris Evans.

[eltonioni]

At present I'd prefer 50 nurses to 1 Chris Evans.

Chris Evans' BBC salary tax bill only pays for 43 nurses. Shame on him, he'll have to make up the other 7 with the VAT on the hair dye.

[riverrock]

Chris Evans makes and presents the most popular radio show in the UK (over 8 million listeners every show) and does over 200 of them a year. If you do the multiplication, that is a huge number more individual listens than any other piece of media.
Yet Ant and Dec each get a huge amount more.
Seems like good value...

[chevvron]

Chris Evans makes and presents the most popular radio show in the UK (over 8 million listeners every show) and does over 200 of them a year. If you do the multiplication, that is a huge number more individual listens than any other piece of media.
Yet Ant and Dec each get a huge amount more.
Seems like good value...

I hate Ant and Dec even more than I hate Chris Evans; they're all overpaid immature imbeciles as far as I'm concerned.(Just ducking to avoid unusual flying objects aimed at me )

[JoeC]

overpaid immature imbeciles

That, Sir, is and always has been my plan.

[Miscellaneous]

Seems like good value...

Nope, just demonstrates the stupidity in paying A&D whatever they are paid!

A rather peculiar way of assessing value, rr.

[haggis]

For the sake of clarity in all of this could someone spell out exactly to me what "talent" Ant and Dec and Chris Evans have. Have I missed something in life as to me they just appear as non entities and mindless cretins or just maybe I like in a parallel universe.

[AlanB]

I don't really care. You have to pay people what they are worth to the company, and if Chris Evans is worth over 2 mill pa on the balance sheet, then that is fine.

As for the gender divide....it is not as clear cut as that. Not all these people are doing the same job, some work 200 times per year, some once per week. In the same way you wouldn't expect a private company to pay a new starter the same salary as their leading subject matter expert, then there will be differences in pay.

Just another excuse to wheel Corbyn out to start making statements if you ask me, and for BBC executives to start making PC soundings......

At the end of the day, these people could probably make a lot more money in the private sector as per the Clarkson trio.....

[riverrock]

For the sake of clarity in all of this could someone spell out exactly to me what "talent" Ant and Dec and Chris Evans have. Have I missed something in life as to me they just appear as non entities and mindless cretins or just maybe I like in a parallel universe.

Chris Evans has the talent to write, create and present 200 3 hour shows (or there abouts) a year which around 9.5 million people listen to every day.

Works out about £0.0003 per listener per broadcast hour, so the value isn't that bad.

(note he was also paid for Top Gear during that payment run)

As for Ant and Dec, um, pass.

[Paul_Sengupta]

BBC pay cut.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-42827333

BBC media editor Amol Rajan said while competition in the entertainment industry had intensified, the opposite had happened in news.

"Many of those now taking pay cuts secured generous deals years ago," he said.

"That world has disappeared - and these presenters now accept that a chunk of their salaries will have to disappear with it."

[kanga]

However, I also wonder how many other employers let alone employees would have done the equivalent, and then been so open about it.

I hope the deserving ladies receive corresponding improvement. I am reluctant to believe that it's more demanding and so more reward-worthy to do effective reporting in a very open, media-receptive, Anglophone, country like the USA than in a closed, paranoid, xenophobic one like China where mastering the languages is an essential first step.

Humphrys' career should have been destroyed by the Hutton revelations, IMHO

[PeteSpencer]

If I had been a BBC male newsreader I would be seriously nobbed off by having my salary so publically dissected by the media and then being morally blackmailed into taking a cut,( there being no other way unilaterally to alter my contract) to satisfy the PC brigade.

Peter

[Pete L]

No different to Made in Dagenham.

As a tax payer I'm happy there's more license fee available for making new Clanger episodes.