This year can be dog-eared as the golden age of journalism in the history of news, especially for female reporters and editors. From the appointment of Emma Tucker as the first female editor of The Sunday Times in a century to Samira Ahmed winning the landmark gender pay case against the BBC; female journalists have plenty to celebrate. But have these cases opened the floodgates for female correspondents to speak up and demand their rights or are we (especially BAME women reporters) still at the short end of the rope?
“We started to see more BAME women on-screen in the 2000s, often as presenters then reporters in their own right with authority. But no one has yet assessed how they were paid because payment for presenters has often been negotiated behind closed doors and not been very scientific.
“I think brave women like Carrie Gracie and Samira Ahmed have now opened the lid on this, so the BBC now has to confront the inequities and deal with them,” explains Anita Bhalla OBE.
Instrumental in establishing BBC Asian Network in West Midlands back in the day, today Anita heralds a new dawn in British mainstream media. An industry, where male presenters can no longer get away without justifying why they received “10 times more than their female counterpart for the same show and similar work”.
Last month Samira Ahmed won her employment tribunal after successfully arguing that she was paid less than Jeremy Vine for similar work. Subsequently, the corporation then decided to settle with the Newswatch presenter. Whilst, the settlement amount has not been disclosed, experts estimate that Ahmed is likely to receive at least £400,000 from the BBC. This followed after the BBC failed to provide any reason to the tribunal for the pay discrimination.
Earlier at the London Central Employment Tribunal, Ahmed had said that she was paid £465 per episode of Newswatch while fellow male presenter Jeremy Vine was paid up to £3,000 for each episode.
Following Ahmed’s landmark victory eight other BBC staff have now lodged employment tribunal claims related to pay discrimination according to The Times. Besides, there are 38 internal pay queries submitted by BBC staff still standing unresolved. Does it mean that Ahmed’s case followed by Carrie Gracie’s resignation on grounds of equal pay opened the floodgates especially for other BAME female reporters? Anita debunks this theory and explains,
“An employment tribunal unanimously said that the BBC had failed to provide convincing evidence that the pay gap was for reasons other than gender discrimination. So, I don't think it has set a precedent for BAME journalists, colour, in this case, was irrelevant and did not come up as a factor
“I know there have been race discriminations brought against the BBC in the past, from men and women, many have been settled out of court.
“With Samira Ahmed’s case, the BBC had argued, among other issues, that Vine deserved a higher pay packet as he was more famous and had a “glint in his eye”. I think that that is a point for further discussion. What do we mean by a glint in someone’s eye, do we then bring perceptions of beauty into the discussion, what is the worth of your personality….this is a much bigger debate which has to be tackled.”
Race discrimination cases and tick-box diversity schemes
Racial profiling and an obsession for tick-box diversity schemes have become a new norm for most organisations. Media groups are not isolated from this trend. Whilst it can be argued that channels have more BAME women presenters bringing news to our drawing rooms, perhaps light should also be cast on the recent controversy around Naga Munchetty.
The BBC Breakfast presenter had been found to have breached the BBC's guidelines over her remarks that President Donald Trump’s comments were “embedded in racism”.
Munchetty had said this in the context of the American President’s tweets about female politicians of colour asking them to “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came."
Following a complaints procedure and backlash from pressure groups, Lord Hall decided to overturn BBC’s decision on partially upholding a complaint against Munchetty. However, this had generated a debate in the British mainstream newsrooms around what can be said: “on and off-air.” In an age where journalists are trolled for their tweets despite their bios stating “views are personal”, the line between reporting facts and expressing personal opinions has become blurry at best and invisible at worst.
From cultural reporting to Global Trade Correspondent
But that is not to limit the progress of ethnic journalists. Perhaps, the recent appointment of Dharshini David as the BBC’s first Global Trade Correspondent best illustrates this. Defining a bygone era of mainstream journalism where ethnic minority reporters were boxed into cultural reporting, Anita say,
“I was on the TV circuit reporting and presenting long before the Asian Network was set up. Back then BAME women were nowhere to be seen unless you were on the Asian programmes like “Nai Zindagi Naya Jeevan”. The sari or salwar kameez clad pioneering women were given a fairly safe topic on these programmes and spoke immaculate Hindi or Urdu.
“When I came along as a young presenter/reporter on Asian TV programmes, not wearing traditional clothes and reporting in English the backlash I received was from our own communities with letters (mainly from men) asking that I be taken off the TV because I was undermining “our culture”. On the other end by the white male media establishment in the BBC, we were simply ignored.”
BAME female journalists have crawled their way within the bureaus of British media but there is still more work to be done.
