Media should mind its gender pay gap and embrace mandatory reporting

Gender pay gap reporting legislation is coming to Ireland and if the comprehensive exercise that has just taken place for the first time in Britain is anything to go by, it will prove a simultaneously wonderful and awkward event for journalists.

Wonderful, because it’s not every day that a raft of statistics telling us something about society are published on a searchable website, providing raw material for a large supply of bang-to-rights stories.

Wonderful, because journalists know it is healthy for audiences to know who exactly is in control of the content they consume, and good, too, that women can have this clear window into the culture of prospective employers.

It will also be helpful if it means more senior executives will be obliged to understand the difference between the gender pay gap (not good) and gender pay discrimination (illegal), and if it means some depth and nuance will be added to the discussion of both (instead of repeatedly stating, hey, women have babies, that must be the beginning and end of what’s happening here).

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It may also be a little awkward. If the Irish media’s gender pay gap is in any way similar to that of Britain, individual journalists will once again be put in the position of seeming to “lecture” other industries, or perhaps even other organisations within their own industry, for their terrible records on gender pay, while knowing – not just suspecting – that their own employer is worse.

Channel 5 was one of the count-them-on-one-hand media companies that paid women more than men on an hourly basis

Certainly, this was how it has played out in recent weeks in Britain, where journalists at the Telegraph Media Group, which hadn't exactly shied away from criticising the BBC for its gender record, were dismayed to find that their own company paid women 35 per cent less on average than men (the equivalent number at the BBC being 10.7 per cent).

Clear trend

Across news media, broadcasting, advertising, marketing, book publishing and the film and music businesses, the trend was clear: men were being paid more than women. In some cases, a lot more.

Vogue publisher Condé Nast Publications had one of the worst records among media companies, with a mean hourly gender pay gap of 36.9 per cent – in other words, women were paid 63 pence for every £1 that men were paid. Condé Nast managed to achieve this despite having more women than men in each of the four pay quartiles, suggesting their figures are skewed by a rank of generously-remunerated men at the very top.

One of the welcome facets of the British legislation was that each company with 250 or more employees was obliged to annually calculate and publish several things: mean and median gender pay gaps on hourly pay and on bonuses, the proportion of men and women receiving bonuses, and the proportion of men and women in each quartile pay band.

The latter obligation identifies companies that like to pool their female employees in the lowest paid roles and are, let’s just say, not lacking in male role models at the senior end.

Sharp variances in bonuses could also be observed. Channel 5 was one of the count-them-on-one-hand media companies that paid women more than men on an hourly basis (2.9 per cent more), but women's bonus pay was 21.3 per cent lower than men's, and across parent company Viacom, men were paid 2.8 per cent more. To its credit, Viacom didn't trumpet its relatively good performance, admitting it still had "areas of marked imbalance, particularly on bonuses".

Legacy issues

It is important to note that gender pay gaps may arise for a variety of reasons, some of which may not be the employer’s fault per se, and some of which they may have a distinct influence on.

Gender pay gaps, often the legacy of historical occupational segregation, do not prove the presence of illegal pay discrimination. But they don’t preclude it either.

Until the magic moment when gender pay reporting does become the law, the only organisation-wide gender pay data we have in the Irish media is for RTÉ

In the case of journalist Carrie Gracie, who resigned her position as BBC China editor because the BBC was not paying her anywhere near the same as its male North America and Middle East editors, the dispute was not about the gender pay gap, but equal pay. Gracie made a convincing case that these roles are on a par and should be paid accordingly – anything less was unlawful pay discrimination in which she no longer wished to "collude".

Her stand followed those of Sinéad Desmond, who left TV3 after 11 years of presenting Ireland AM because she was not being paid the same as her male co-hosts, and Catt Sadler, the E! news host who quit the US channel after finding out her pay was about half that of her male co-hosts.

In the era of #PayMeToo, these conflicts may only increase. But until the magic moment when gender pay reporting does become the law, the only organisation-wide gender pay data we have in the Irish media is for RTÉ.

Kieran Mulvey’s review, conducted in the wake of concerns raised by RTÉ employees last summer, identified a below-average pay differential of 4 per cent. However, this has been described as “not the full picture” by the National Union of Journalists, as Mulvey was given “limited terms of reference” that excluded those on self-employed contracts.

Even with that, there were some dispiriting devils to be found in the detail such as a 17-7 split in favour of men in the higher-paid staff news and current affairs roles, attributed to “historical circumstances”.

Pretty much everything on this topic can be attributed to “historical circumstances”. Now is the time for the media and the Government to move that history along.