Morality and Gender Equality

Moral Maze

BBC

Society & Culture, Religion & Spirituality

4.5 • 609 Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2017

⏱️ 43 minutes

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Summary

Despite the introduction of the Equal Pay Act nearly half a century ago, the BBC salary revelations of last week suggest that the most dramatic example of inequality for women - the gender pay gap - shows no immediate sign of narrowing. In a letter urging the corporation to act now to deal with the disparity, many of its highest-profile female personalities emphasise "what many of us have suspected for many years... that women at the BBC are being paid less than men for the same work." Logically, the legal and moral case for paying the same rate for the same job is overwhelming. But in practice, can two jobs ever be exactly the same? Even if they are the same on paper, what people do with their jobs may be very different. Many examples of the difference in the average earnings of men and women stem from the biological fact that women are the child-bearers. Does that mean we will never be able to escape an inherently misogynistic culture? What more could or should companies, government and society reasonably do about gender disparities? Is positive discrimination essential, or does it merely address the symptoms rather than the causes of inequality? Would a ban on the promotion of perceived gender stereotypes in advertising be one useful way of tackling everyday sexism? Or is viewing society through the prism of gender an unhealthy obsession and an unhelpful distraction from the job of tackling wider inequalities in wealth, health and education? Witnesses are Emily Hill, Nikki Van De Gaag, Sophie Walker and Dr Joanna Williams.

Producer: Dan Tierney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4.
0:04.4	Good evening. It was the legendary film producer Sam Goldwyn, who summed up the moral ambiguities of stardom
0:10.4	with one of his unconscious oxymorons. We're overpaying him, he said of one of his leading men,
0:16.4	but he's worth it. The BBC didn't quite say that when it was forced to disclose the money paid to its
0:21.7	highest earners, but the discomfort in this building is almost tangible. It's not just that some
0:27.2	household names are paid so much more than those behind the scenes, but the apparent disparity
0:32.5	between men and women stars themselves, even if they sit on the same sofa, cranking out the same repartee.
0:39.2	There's a wider context. Nearly 50 years after the Equal Pay Act came into force, and both
0:44.2	the legal and moral case for equality appeared to be accepted, it still doesn't yet seem to have
0:49.0	happened. Mind you, comparisons aren't always easy. Are any two jobs ever exactly the same, let alone the experienced talent and training brought to them? Does the inescapable fact that women are the child-bearers mean true career equality for everybody is impossible? Or is it simple misogyny and what we need is a stiffer dose of positive discrimination. Is all the hoo-har missing
1:13.0	the point? Okay, it's a deeper problem than the headlines that mostly seem to be about how
1:18.3	unfair it is that a woman on whacking mula for not very much is getting less than an equivalent
1:23.7	man. But should we be worrying about more important inequalities in class,
1:29.0	health, wealth and education? That's our moral maze tonight. The panel, we couldn't afford
1:34.3	any better. Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, the priest and guardian pundit, Charles Fraser,
1:39.6	Mona Siddiqui, Professor of Islamic and Inter-Religious Studies at Edinburgh University,
1:44.2	and the historian and blogger Tim Stanley.
1:47.7	Charles Fraser, unaccountably, not on the list, of course.
1:51.8	But when you first saw the list, did the gender disparity bother you?
1:58.1	Yeah, too right.
1:59.0	I mean, I'm old-fashioned enough to think that the BBC is a sort of moral enterprise,
2:04.4	and the discovery that it apparently values men so much more than it values women
	...

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