What’s the real impact of the ethnic pay gap?
Beyond Today
BBC
4.6 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 18 December 2018
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Over the past year, the gender pay gap has sparked outrage across the country. But another issue considered more uncomfortable and unspoken about is slowly coming to light: the ethnic minority pay gap. The BBC’s Rianna Croxford has been investigating the ethnic pay gap at the UK’s top universities. We speak to her and discuss the impact of that gap with Olivette Otele, the UK’s first black female history professor.
Correction: this episode contains a reference to the percentage of students graduating with first class degrees by ethnicity. These figures are incorrect. The correct figures are that 53% of black students get a first or a 2:1, compared to two thirds of Asian students and 78% of white students. Apologies.
Producers: Seren Jones and Lucy Hancock. Editor: John Shields
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, music radio podcasts. |
| 0:04.6 | Hello, I'm Matthew Price. |
| 0:08.4 | This is Beyond Today from BBC Radio 4, a space to ask one big question about one big story. |
| 0:17.0 | Today, what's the real impact of the ethnic pay gap? |
| 0:24.0 | A few hours ago, this massively talented new journalist here at the BBC came into our studio. |
| 0:37.0 | Her name is Riana Croxford and she's driven, she's hardworking, you can see that just by sitting opposite her. |
| 0:43.6 | And for almost a year she's been trying to find out if black women teaching in British |
| 0:47.1 | universities are underpaid. |
| 0:50.0 | What she found isn't just that the ethnic pay gap is real, which we probably all knew anyway, |
| 0:55.1 | but that what we're actually learning is all coming from a largely white perspective. |
| 1:00.5 | In the last few days, she got all the information that she needed to uncover what's really going on, and she came in to tell us. |
| 1:07.0 | Why are you so interested in it? I mean, nine months, ten months, that's a long time to work on one story. |
| 1:12.0 | I know, I do admit I've become a bit |
| 1:14.0 | obsessed with numbers. I am now. So I had the idea back in March it was around the time that |
| 1:21.7 | universities were revealing their gender pay gaps and |
| 1:25.0 | I feel like the Me Too movement a lot of people, a lot of women in particular |
| 1:29.6 | feel like these moments centre around white women their feelings their experiences and they kind of feel like they get |
| 1:37.6 | other or kind of stepped aside and I thought well be really interested if I can actually find a figure or find out if there really is a difference between women of the experience of women of color and white women and I started digging into this and I tried about four or five different ways of |
| 1:56.4 | getting as much to age as I could as specific and as broad as possible |
| 2:01.1 | and we found out that there are differences so if you're a white woman |
| 2:04.8 | for instance at a Russell Group University you can expect to earn on average 15% |
| 2:10.7 | less than white men if you're from an Asian background, this rises to 22. |
... |
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