Behind the Wireless by Kate Murphy

Author:Kate Murphy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

Inequality in Pay

Equal pay was a highly contentious issue in the interwar years. It was a focus of feminist campaigners and professional women’s trade unions, with teachers and Civil Servants at the forefront of the struggle.148 The BBC, unlike teaching and the Civil Service, did not operate separate salary scales for women and men. All salaried staff were graded from ‘E’ (lowest) to ‘A’ (highest). However, the process of recruitment, coupled with the realities of promotion, meant there were proportionally far more women in the lower grades ‘E’ and ‘D’ (56 per cent of women as compared to 25 per cent of men) than the top grades ‘B’ and ‘A’ (11.5 per cent of women compared to 39 per cent of men). Only two women, Hilda Matheson and Mary Somerville, were ever graded ‘A’, as Chapter 6 will show.149 And being in a lower grade was, naturally, associated with lower pay.

A chief reason for discrepancies in earnings at the BBC was starting salaries. Almost invariably, those promoted from the waged ranks started their salaried careers on £260 a year. Similarly, women recruited from outside the BBC were likely to start on this rate, often thrilled with the amount. Olive Shapley, for instance, recalled that as she sat in the studio on her first day watching a BBC colleague play a tune on a tin whistle, she thought ‘they can’t be going to pay me £250 a year for doing this’ (in fact, as noted, her starting pay was £260).150 In Our Freedom and its Results, Ray Strachey commented on how the task itself appeared to absorb able women who were not active in demanding increases of pay and status. It was an observable fact, she noted, that women were apt to be ‘tame, timid and biddable employees’.151 At the BBC, all salaries were independently negotiated which resulted in huge variations between staff, men and women alike. For women, this could have a doubly detrimental effect because not only were they less adept at negotiating higher starting rates (if they were even aware that salary levels could be discussed) but also they were far more likely to have come to the BBC from a lower paid job. This was recognised in 1938 when it was pointed out that although ‘theoretically’ the same payment was made to women and men for comparable work, because starting salaries related to outside market value, women generally began lower in the salary scales so ‘age for age they were generally paid less’.152 Reith was also attune to the significance of starting salaries. Janet Adam Smith was startled to discover that she had been given a £100 salary rise just two weeks before she left the BBC. It had been specifically requested by Reith who was aware that, if Adam Smith were to work again, her future employer would ask what she had last earned at the BBC ‘and it would be better to say £650 than £550’.153

On rare occasions women did negotiate high starting salaries. Mary Somerville and Mary Adams, for example, and also Christine Orr.

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