The unsurprising yet still shocking BBC pay revelations of elite employees’ salaries give voice and substance to a pay gap that we know exists but to date has lacked a concrete sense of reality. Figures from the Office for National Statistics indicates a UK pay gap at 19.2% for full- and part-time workers, with women earning an average of 80 pence for every £1 earned by a man. The BBC’s publication of a top list of earners with household names we can all relate to, renders discrimination tangible and familiar. Making visible individual TV and broadcast celebrities’ annual salaries connects the UK license paying population to a clearly discriminatory hierarchy of pay. The highest earning female Claudia Winkelman’s substantial annual salary documented at £499,000 is a quarter of the highest earning male Chris Evans whose pay packet is reckoned at a staggering 2.25million in 2016, and reported as equalling the combined salaries of all of the black and minority ethnic BBC high-earners.
