Tennis icon Martina Navratilova revealed recently that “she found herself a victim of a gender pay gap at the hands of the very studio behind the report, the BBC”. During a recent segment for a televised special report titled ‘Britain’s Equal Pay Scandal’, she said that while she was paid around £15,000 for her work providing commentary on the BBC for Wimbledon, she believed her fellow pundit John McEnroe received much more: around £150,000.
The BBC did not deny the pay discrepancy, but said gender wasn’t a factor, adding that McEnroe’s role was of “a different scale, scope and time commitment” to Navratilova’s. “McEnroe is regarded as the face of our Wimbledon coverage. He is widely considered to be the best expert/commentator in the sport,” the BBC said.
This is not the first time the gender pay gap debate has hit the BBC. Last summer, women BBC personalities wrote an open letter to the BBC’s Director about the pay difference they had personally experienced. The British government forced the BBC to disclose the salaries of their top on-air talent, which showed a stark gender pay gap, with male anchors making in, some cases, twice as much as their female co-anchors.
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How do you define value in such cases? Doesn’t experience count when deciding who the “expert” in a field is? Navratilova’s astounding tennis record includes 18 Grand Slam titles, compared to McEnroe’s seven.
One could argue that perhaps McEnroe’s public profile, his popularity as the face of BBC’s coverage would boost his billing. But could the difference realistically amount to over a hundred thousand pounds more, for a couple of weeks’ work?
The gender pay gap is an unfortunate feature of many industries, from banking to Hollywood. It recently emerged that Claire Foy earned less than Matt Smith for the Netflix drama
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Some argue that the remuneration of celebrity athletes and anchors is an unviable rallying cause when the same observation might be made more pertinently of other, perhaps less glamorous professions. Why fret about wage discrepancies measured in millions? Such debates nevertheless matter because if women of such heft and leverage are being exploited, it says much about just how pervasive this rot has been across the work force. Navratilova was upset less for her own sake than for others with more at stake. “For me it’s a part-time job, it’s two weeks of my life,” she said. “For the women that work there full time, it adds up over a lifetime.”
The call for equal pay is the call for better coverage and reporting. Men are still making broadcasting decisions and controlling narratives. Pay women equally, and more women will stay in the business. This will allow for a clearer representation of viewpoints, perhaps even lessen the importance of the “male gaze”.
Preethi Ramamoorthy writes on tennis for The Hindu