Jul 2017: Open Letter re: “BBC gender pay gap revealed: two-thirds of top earners are men” The Daily Telegraph.

The Daily Telegraph recently published an article entitled ”BBC Gender Pay Gap Revealed: Two Thirds of Top Earners are Men”.

House of Beaufort Director, Dr Susan Laverick, responded with the following open letter to the editor of the Daily Telegraph and other media outlets.

By April 2018, all UK companies, with 250 or more employees, will be legally required to publish their gender pay gaps. Many, like the BBC, will have done their best to ensure diversity across the corporation, but will have failed to achieve parity. Today’s article “BBC Gender Pay Gap Revealed” reminds us that impassioned arguments about experience and expertise versus parity of pay will continue to obscure a vital aspect of workplace discrimination.

As a woman helping other women to manage their careers more robustly, I pounced on the comment from a BBC journalist who noted that women need to “get serious”, “stick together”, because “if you don’t ask, you don’t get”. This puts the onus on women to push the gender pay gap their way.  Just ask.

Yet many women first need to learn how to ask.  Framing a conversation for a salary rise or promotion just doesn’t come naturally to some.  We have discovered this to be the case with the dozens of talented women with whom we have worked across the financial services industries, the law and other corporations. Learning how to initiate, manage difficult conversations and articulate worth is a service that all employers could offer their female workers.  So that come annual review time, they feel more confident about their value. In post-Brexit Britain, corporations must surely support all of their talent if the difficult times ahead are to be safely navigated.

 

Dr. Susan Laverick
Director, House of Beaufort Limited