IT WAS A TOUR DE FORCE of FURY: CONTROLLED FURY

[Michael Grove]

  She wasn’t ranting and raving. Yes, there were moments,

  here and there, when her voice thickened & she appeared

  to be in tears: tears, more than anything, of frustration.

  But she remained in control. She was frank, clear, direct:

  brutally direct. Her fury was as clean and true as a laser.

  Carrie Grace  was in Parliament to tell MPs the full story:

  about her resignation as the BBC’s China Editor, about

  the BBC’s gender pay gap, about how the BBC had treated

  her, and about how it treated countless other female staff.

  It had been bad enough, she said, discovering that she was

  paid substantially less than the male international editors.

  But then she heard the BBC’s excuse. Apparently she’d

  been paid less than the men because the BBC deemed her

  to be “in development”.

  In development. She stopped speaking, and let those two

  words hang in the air, for the rest of the room to stare at.

  MPs laughed in disbelief. In development. A senior

  journalist, who’d been working at the BBC for 30 years;

  an international editor, reporting from one of the most

  powerful nations on Earth. Yet here was the BBC, talking

  about her as if she’d just arrived for two weeks’ work

  experience.

  Her glare could have burnt through a breezeblock.

  Appearing close to tears at times during more than two

  hours of testimony, Gracie said the BBC’s attempts to

  explain the gulf between male and female salaries was

  “trying to retrofit justifications for the indefensible”.

  In her evidence she accused the BBC's head of news,

  Fran Unsworth, of misleading her over her salary in

  comparison to male counterparts.

  Gracie said: “I would expect the most senior woman in

  BBC News to stand up for her senior women journalists.” 

  She also described her fury at seeing the former head of

  news, James Harding, appear on television to claim there

  was no equal pay problem at the BBC.

 

 “I just thought, ‘NO, that’s not what BBC journalists do.

  THEY TELL THE TRUTH,” Gracie said.

  

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