Journalists at the Financial Times are threatening to strike over their growing anger about the gender pay gap at the newspaper.
An email from trade union leaders at the FT to about 600 staff said there was an increasing sense managers at the organisation “have not been taking this matter seriously enough” and added that the lack of transparency about pay for executives at the newspaper “does not inspire confidence”.
The gender pay gap among the FT’s editorial staff is 13%, the biggest shortfall in a decade, the letter adds. A target of reaching equality by 2022 is slower than the BBC’s aim of closing the gender pay gap by 2020.
FT staff will meet to discuss the issue on Wednesday, when they will be addressed by an unnamed BBC female star among those who signed a letter calling for the corporation to close the pay gap.
The BBC is facing a backlash after a list of the corporation’s top earners revealed that just one-third were women and the top seven were all men.
More than 40 of the BBC’s most high-profile women wrote to Tony Hall, the director general, calling on him to urgently correct the gender pay gap.
An FT source said feelings were running very high over the gender pay gap at the organisation, which is owned by Japanese company Nikkei.
In the email to staff, Steve Bird, the father of the FT’s National Union of Journalists chapel, said: “There is an increasing sense among journalists here that FT managers have not been taking this matter seriously enough.
“The gender pay gap in FT Editorial is nearly 13% – the biggest shortfall in a decade – and the company’s ‘ambition’ to reach equality by 2022 is worse than the BBC’s present target of 2020.
“Working for a private company where even the salaries of the editor and CEO are not disclosed does not inspire confidence in the FT’s commitment to transparency, and recent corporate statements seem more concerned about the commercial implications of gender bias than bringing women’s salaries into line with those of male counterparts.
“After a recent leader in the FT stated: ‘Women are right to be angry at the pay gap’, it’s time for the Financial Times to put its money where its mouth is.”
The FT said: “We take the matter of gender pay seriously and welcome the government’s move to make all large UK companies report on the issue.
“We have a 50/50 female-male split among our workforce and there are more women in senior roles across the newsroom and commercial teams than ever before. We have a long list of active initiatives in place to further that progress.
“We will be reporting on pay in due course, in line with the UK government timetable. From benchmarking we have seen we compare favourably to the industry.”
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