The Shaming Initiative

a good job. Twice. I've been a World Television Society normally for the BBC for specialist journalists of the year. It's just and you know what, I get me emotional. But what I really wants to say about this equal pay problem at the BBC is what it forces the BBC to do is to retrofit in defense, you know, defenses, justifications of the indefensible. The BBC gets most of its funding from the public. Its newest charter required the broadcaster

to reveal how much it pays its top talent. The government thought that people should know where their money was going. It turned out it was mostly going to men. The BBC had a wide pay gap at its most senior levels. The top man made over two million pounds, the highest paid woman just a quarter of that. You have an equal pay problem, but you can't admit it because you don't want to confront what maybe fiscal liabilities, which we all agree are there. The BBC's pay scandal and Carries

public statements caused a big headache for the company. The broadcaster has faced almost two hundred equal pay complaints and a flood of negative press. The BBC told Bloomberg in a statement, we are committed to making the BBC the best place for women to work, and have said we want to close the gender pay gap and have women in half of leadership and on air rolls by When individual issues over pay have been raised, we have sought to resolve them as quickly as possible, but Carry wants

more from the BBC. My problem will be resolved by an acknowledgement that my work was of equal value to the men who I served alongside as an international editor. Carrie's story doesn't sound that different than the ones we've been telling you about in the US, but there is one big difference between here and there. The British government isn't just requiring the BBC to fest up about pay, it's requiring all of its biggest businesses to report their

gender pay gaps. Companies don't have to get as specific as the BBC did. Remember, the BBC is funded by British taxpayers, so that's why it had to disclose. But as part of a new law that went into effect this year, all large companies in the UK have to report to the government what they pay men versus women. And Carrie's story was kind of a prelude to the reckoning the entire country is going through now. When you look at the world, you know what the population like,

Where is our place like? Where is our value? Where going to deserve people for equal work? The gender alive stops to keep women not on a pedistal but in case you don't feel it, But when you see the numbers, it's shocking. Get a power equalization between the sexiest women. What do they want? We want to end gender inequality and to do this we need everyone involved. Without women's work, the wheel of the country they did not turn. You always ask who's the best person, and it forms a

white bloke that's got to pay something wrong. And here are the all male nominees. Welcome back to the paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. The pay gap isn't just a phenomenon in the US. Globally, women make about half of what men do, and that's average earnings. According to the World Economic Forum, the UK looks a lot like the US. There are some equal pay laws on the books, but on average women make a little under twenty less than men. But unlike the US, the UK is trying to fix

things on a national scale. The country is in the middle of a big nationwide experiment. As of April this year, every large company in the UK had to publicly report its gender pay gap. That is, the raw, unadjusted difference between what all the men and all the women make in a given company. It's a shaming initiative. Companies who have particularly big gaps, and a lot of them do,

will be theoretically incentivized to close them. So far, over ten thou companies have reported, and what they've reported in most cases is that men are making more than women. Goldman Sachs remember the company from episode one that's fighting a class action gender discrimination suit here in the US. It's female UK employees make less than half of what the men do. Over at Bloomberg dot com, there's a graphic that compiled all the company pay gaps, including ours.

These numbers aren't broken down by job title or level of experience, so they don't tell us anything about what men and women are being paid for the same jobs. What these numbers show is that at most companies, women hold very few of the highest paid positions. The question

is what happens next. Susie Ring, a reporter in Bloomberg's London bureau, reports, now that gender pay reporting is the law in England, every single UK company with two fifty employees or more has had to report their gender pay gap. They had a deadline of a to do it, and the figure they were asked for was simple, no fancy math needed, just what an average do the men make

at your company versus what the women make. If the men make a lot more, it likely means yours as a company where men are mostly at the senior levels with the best paid jobs, and women have a lot of the more junior roles. I can remember it being very male top heavy, so I remember attending events and the men at the front were exactly that. There are men um and I remember looking at those people and thinking, will I ever be standing on that stage with those men?

Or actually is it? Is it a man's job? Is it the league manstrow white meal jaw? Actually? This is Sarah Farquaharsen. She's thirty two and has been working in customer service since she was seventeen. She says that through her years in the industry, she's noticed something about her colleagues. They're mostly women, and the people in the most senior ranks mostly men. Sarah now works for Virgin Money, the

financial services business of Richard Branson's sprawling Virgin Empire. She works at the company's customer service center in the northern English city of Newcastle. It's her job to check on how well other customer service agents are answering customer complaints. She's also paid less than most people at her company. Customer service workers are among the lowest paid groups at Virgin Money, and most of the customer service workers are women.

That's why, even though Virgin Money has a female CEO and it openly celebrated this new gender pay reporting law and wants to be at the fourth of women's equality, the company ended out reporting a thirty two gender pay gap. Here's their CEO, Jane A. Gardia. The reason that we report gender pay gap for thirty two is that although I'm you know, we have a female chair, female CEO, and we've got female representation on our EXCO at our next senior levels of management, we are about male and

our customer services brilliant staff are predominantly female. And so when you add up everybody's salaries and divide the male and the female salary, then you get the thirty two

percent pay gap. And that's why I still think numbers are important, because our objective is to get to fifty fifty throughout the organization, and that means recruiting more brilliant men to be fabulous customer service agents and recruiting more brilliant women to be you know, in all layers, if you like, of the hierarchy of management, and at that point our gender pay gap will be equal. When I say, Virgin Money wanted to be out front in the fight

for women, here's an example. They reported gender pay figures a year before they legally had to revealing their pay gap for twenty sixteen. Back then the number was even bigger thirty six. So here was Virgin Money trying to do the right thing and be transparent about their numbers before they technically had to, and their numbers have not been making them look good, and women weren't moving up

into the higher ranks from customer service rolls. The customer service segment accounted for about half its gender pay gap. Here's why Sarah, the customer service worker at Virgin Money, thinks things ended up that way. I think customer services has has historically been a female thing. Um, so you've probably got the forty fifty years worth of female experience

in that area. We work all sorts of shift patterns of virgin and and and I mean that might lend it that actually might lend itself to women more because historically and we have got a we culturally have more of an issue where there is still a view that the woman is the caregiver. And so if if a man returns to a full time and a woman needs to fit to it, I was around that she will

go for a business who offers flexible working. Jana and Guardia says getting their gender pay gap from thirty down to is a start, but she acknowledges they've got a lot of work to do. Remember, going to a number of organizations and broadly forty year old white men saying to me, when you're trying to take my job and my son's job away from me. And the point is that we have to give ourselves time to my progress

because we're not in the business of firing men. It's about making sure that every time there's a new job advertised, we've got diverse job lists to choose from. It's about making sure that in the organization people are understand that um everybody is filled with unconscious bias. Virgin Money is working on changes that will get more men into customer

service jobs and more women into executive positions. The bank offers flexible hours across the company and looks at job applications blind to try and reduce the chances of gender bias. But a big part of their work, maybe even bigger than getting more women into executive roles, is going to be getting more men into customer service jobs. And I think that's really important because it means that you have

to change some attitudes of men. You know, sometimes men think I don't want to go into a customer services job, you know, I want to go into a different role. But actually that's the way I think that in financial services organizations, men and women can make a lifetime career that's going to be successful. It's going to be full of integrity, and it's going to mean that they can grow to be whatever they want in in the businesses

of the future. What Virgin Money is going through this very public realization that they've put more men at the top and more women at the bottom of their company. That's happening to a lot of companies in the UK forced to open up their pay gap numbers. Thousands of businesses are facing an uncomfortable truth and they have to figure out how to explain these numbers to the whole country. Some companies tried to massage the data to make their

numbers look a little bit better. Earlier this year, it came out that some accountancy firms and law firms didn't include partners in the numbers the highest paid tears in their firms. What they were doing was legal. The government had said it was okay to report this way, but when people found out businesses were leaving partners out of the equation, their outrage forced a number of companies to

restate their figures. Then there are the companies that didn't report in time for the deadline, even though they had to buy law. About fifteen hundred businesses missed the April cutoff. In theory, a company can face an unlimited fine for not reporting, but we don't yet know how easy this will be to enforce and how much companies who don't

comply will really have to cough up. But for most companies, what the reporting did was to force them to look closely at how their businesses were structured and why women often seemed to drift to the bottom of that structure. I mean, one classic thing was Ryanair, where there's a pay gap and they were saying, well, it's obvious we've got seventy percent pay gap because all the men of pilots and all the women are serving the drinks. But they've got a global pilot shortage. Why don't they train

some more women as pilots. That was Harriet Harman. She's a British politician and she's also the reason this big new law exists. Ryanair, the company she was just talking about, says that they've seen an increase in applications from female pilots and are quote committed to developing this welcome trend. Harriet is not surprised by the big gaps and companies are reporting. Her third or six year long political career has been a lesson in how the different roles are

for men and women in every industry, including government. When she was elected as a Member of Parliament in only three percent of British politicians were women. It seemed like women were blocked from lots of areas of British politics. Harriet was like a one woman wrecking crew, breaking through

those blockades one by one. She was the first UK female Solicitor General for American listeners, that's basically the equivalent of the Deputy Attorney General, and also the first Minister for women, a role that had never existed before her. It was her job to make policy about issues like women's rights. One of her crusades has been gender paid transparency. But to a lot of politicians, this idea of forcing companies to state their pay gaps, it was just too radical.

I was a bit on my own arguing for transparency for pay transparency, but I felt it would put the power in women's hands if they could actually see what was going on, if the veil of discrimination was torn off, because what had been happening for years is the National Statistical Office would be reporting the overall figure of the pay gap, and every organization they'd go, oh, tucked up, isn't that awful a pay gap? We're so against? That must be happening somewhere else. We'd never have it here.

But of course it always was happening here. Harriet realized that without widespread support, the only way she'd ever get the law through was to go step by tiny step. The first step was to introduce an imperfect solution, make the program voluntary. Companies could make their pay figures public if they chose. Even getting government to do that, create a system for companies to report their pay gap if they wanted to was controversy. Show we had such a

fight down to the wire. It was the very last piece of legislation that got through before the general election, which we then lost. But I didn't manage to get the bill through until the literally the last day. In two thousand and ten. Companies did not jump to publish their pay figures because the reporting was voluntary. Every business worried about sticking their neck out if they didn't have to.

So by Tift, five years after the voluntary solution was put into place, only five companies in the whole country had reported their numbers. Clearly, making reporting optional wasn't working, but politicians couldn't agree on making reporting mandatory either. Vince Cable, seventy five year of British political icon and leader of the Liberal Democrats party, was Business Secretary by this time. He says his political opponents were really resistant to forcing

companies to report. Here he is describing how they put it. The argument feels as well, what is it going to tell us because men and women are doing different geomaty is measuring like for like. But of course, as we know, that raises the basic question about why are there and women doing different roles. In the end, it wasn't even

Harriet or Harriet's party who made the reporting mandatory. A coalition government had taken power after Harriet's party Labor, was voted out, and basically what happened was that the left wing party of that coalition pressured the right wing to make a campaign promise when it was trying to get reelected. When they were reelected, it was the right wing Conservative party who had to make good on their promise and ended up forcing companies to reveal their gender pay gaps,

and that's where the UK is now. It took years for a mostly male government to decide that companies should even be asked to state what men and women make, and even now that the numbers are out, there was still seeing companies try to make their numbers better without paying women more, or failed to report or not adequately explain why women end up in the low paid jobs

and men in the high paid ones. Given how long it's taken us to get to this point, I asked Harriet how long she thinks it should take the country to close its gender pay gap. These are things that management can change if they want to, And therefore I think that women have waited long enough and endured unequal pay long enough. If you try and add together all the costs that women have borne by an equal pay,

it is untold billions. So I would say sooner rather than later, I think women have fed up with waiting for equality. We don't know yet how much there will affect the pay gap in the UK. Its main purpose is to diagnose the problem. It's up to companies to look at their number and decide what, if anything, they're going to do. But in another European country, there's a new law that's getting a lot of attention. It compels

companies to do something about the pay gap. Iceland, like the US and the UK, passed equal pay and anti discrimination laws decades ago. The anti discrimination law has been strengthened four times since nineteen seventy six, and the country has also passed laws requiring an equal number of men and women on company boards. But despite all of this, Iceland still has a pay gap of about sixteen percent,

so this year it doubled down. While the UK has been looking at the average pay difference between men and women, Iceland has passed a new law focused on men and women who hold the same job. Claire Setteth reports starting this year, companies with more than twenty five employees have to submit to the government official salaries for every job and and if one employee is making more than another who's doing his or her exact same job, a company

has to justify that discrepancy in writing. My name is Rosa, maybe because of those long surnames mean we use giving names in Iceland, so you can call me Rosa. But I'm the head of the Equality Unit at the Ministry of Welfare and in Iceland. Rosa is in charge of this big new salary law and the experiment the country ran to see if it would even work. In two thousand eight, Iceland launched a pilot version of the law with real businesses to see what worked and what didn't.

One of the businesses that participated was Iceland's Customs office, where men tended to be in field jobs and women worked in the office. Those field jobs they paid better, so custom officers working out in the field, for example, are of the cases made. And they had had the unwritten rule that those men could return to the headquarters when they were close to their retirement aids and just

do ordinary office work. But then they were sitting and sharing offices with women that were working as secretaries and the equal past and that is based on the rule of paying equally for jobs of equal value. So employers needs to ask those questions, what are we paying for? You know, what value has this job for the company? Here were men working alongside women doing the same jobs, and because of their field job salary histories, the men

were getting paid more under this new law. The customs are has had to explain that to the government, and Iceland decided that If the only reason you're paying one employee more than another is that he's an older man close to retirement, well that's not a good enough reason. The Customs Office volunteered to be part of this experiment, they didn't necessarily think they'd find much of a paid discrepancy. Rosa says that a lot of companies were in this boat.

But many employers set that at the beginning, we are not discriminating in our company. But in many cases they found out that their workplaces were just astenti biased as any other, and that there were in some cases discriminating against individuals. I didn't know, and I don't think that people decide that they are going to discriminate against people, or that they're going to pay this guy or this woman more or less than the colleagues. It's something that happens.

When companies discover a pay gap like this, they're required to fix it. They can give people raises or even make pay cuts, but essentially they have to bring people in line with the stated salary for their job. To be clear, this new law is just one small part of Iceland's pay gap strategy. In fact, Rosa isn't really sure why Iceland's getting so much pressed for it. We are getting a lot of attention for the work we

are doing. It's it's unbelievable, you know, because I've been around since in this field, since twenty years or for twenty years, and I mean, we have never had this attention for the policy field. Here's something incredible about Iceland in any given year between forty and Parliament is women. The reason Iceland has been able to tackle this issue is that women have enough power to be able to

make the changes they want. In fact, this whole focus on workplace equality got started because in whopping of the country's women went on strike from their jobs, from child care and chores at home to protest their mistreatment. In Iceland was the first country in the whole world to democratically elect a woman as head of state. All those women have helped get these laws passed. Even with all these changes, closing Iceland's gap is taking an awfully long time.

They still have that six percent pay gap, and once you account for the differences in the types of jobs men and women hold or hours worked, six percent of that gap still persists. A decade ago, it was eight but at this rate it's going to take another thirty years to get it down to zero. Politicians have learned from experience that genter equality doesn't come about on its owner court. They need to push things and um. They've also learned that if they will wait on the normal

poses legislative chances, they can wait forever. The fact that even in Iceland, where so many laws are already on the books to narrow the pay gap, where so many women are making the laws, there's still a sixteen percent gap. So as you just how hard it is to get to true equality. Iceland wants to eliminate its pay gap within the next five years. But that gap is the results of generations of traditions and habits and beliefs that

we've held about women and men's place in society. That's something that can't just be fixed with a few raissa. Iceland had a magic ingredient to getting laws passed a lot of women lawmakers. The United States isn't tackling the pay gap on the same national scale as Iceland and other countries, but that could change. A record number of women in the US declared they were running for office in If those women win, who knows they might look to Iceland for inspiration, but that's a lot of ifs.

For now, most of the effort to close the pay gap here isn't happening on the federal level. Next week we'll find out what happens when it's up to companies and not the government to fix pay inequality. Thanks for listening to another episode of The Paycheck. If you like the show, please head on over to Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to rate, review and subscribe. The show was reported by Susie Rings Claire Setteth and hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was edited by Chessca

Levie and produced by Magnus Hendrickson. We also had helped from Jillian Goodman, Janet Paskin, and Liz Smith. Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderyott did the illustrations on our show page, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com Slash the Paycheck. Francesca Levie is head of Bloomberg Podcasts.