IFJ
05 March 2021
Equal pay: “700 BBC women have had pay rises since my case”, Samira Ahmed
On 24 February 2020, the London Central Employment Tribunal ruled that female journalist Samira Ahmed’s hosting work on BBC’s Newswatch programme was equal to that of her male colleague, Jeremy Vine, on Points of View and that therefore she was entitled to equal pay. We asked her about the impact of this historic settlement a year after the verdict, and how BBC’s payment structures have changed since then.
Samira Ahmed
1. What convinced you to lodge a claim against the BBC for equal pay?
I’d known from the moment I took up the Newswatch presenter post in 2012 that I was being underpaid and had tried to get this corrected with the BBC, internally and quietly. After the public publication of the first list of the most highly paid BBC presenters in 2017 I knew the gap with my male comparator was much bigger than I’d previously imagined. I raised an official equal pay grievance using the internal BBC processes – informal and then formal - to try and get it resolved. I pursued them to the end of the road. That took 2 years. The BBC still refused to accept there was a problem. By this point I was hitting the legal deadline for being able to claim the full 6 years and 6 months of backpay, so I filed for tribunal.