A new report from MPs has found that the BBC still has a prevalent equal pay issue, which it is refusing to admit.
The digital, culture, media and sport select committee published a report on Thursday finding BBC female staff to be paid substantially less than male counterparts.
The report demanded an end to a culture of “invidious, opaque decision-making” over pay.
“Our evidence suggests women within the BBC are working in comparable jobs to men but earning far less. The corporation was unable to give us a good reason for why or how pay discrimination has been left unchallenged for so long,” it said.
“Where staff come forward with complaints, management must refrain from using unhelpful terminology and talk about these cases in terms of ‘equal pay’, rather than using euphemisms such as ‘fair pay’, ‘oversights’ and pay ‘revisions’, in an attempt to avoid the issues at hand.”
The BBC Women campaign group represents over 170 presenters and producers. The group said the issue over equal pay at the BBC left some women “feeling worthless or diminished, ground down by an employer refusing to admit any equal pay liability even where it accepts there are unexplained and unjustified differences between men and women”.
The BBC has said that the report is out of date.
Director general Tony Hall said: “This report is looking backwards and has not caught up to where we are. In the last year, our gender pay gap is one of the lowest in the media in the UK, if not the lowest.”
“It’s come down in the last year by 20%, and we’re the only organisation in the UK who’s committed to getting our gender pay gap down to equal by the end of 2020.”
The report came on the same day as a report by Ofcom, which assesses how the corporation is performing. Ofcom said that the BBC needed to work in increasing transparency, take more risks with original programming, attract more young people and represent UK society better.