The BBC, 'Star' Salaries and Gender Inequality in Payments

The article below originally appeared in a comment I posted in Facebook under a link in the BBC page there to an article appearing in its own website here. I have expanded/modified my original Facebook comment somewhat.

The BBC has recently been forced to publish the salaries of all 'stars' being paid £150,000 p.a. or more, and this has confirmed what had only been strongly suspected before - wide differences between the remuneration paid to different people for doing what seem to be very similar work, with the differences being based on gender (men generally being paid more) and/or ethnic origin.

Gender inequality is wrong, so my suggestion is to lower all the salaries of the male so-called "stars" until they are similar to those of the females whose jobs are similar or indistinguishable from what they are employed to do. Some of the higher female salaries could be reduced too. If any of them (male or female) are not happy, they can I'm sure try to offer their talents instead to commercial networks in the hope of being paid more.

I imagine their contracts come up for renegotiation every few years - BBC management need to learn how to manage and husband its guaranteed revenue stream more wisely, via the mandatory licence fee it is privileged to receive. I rarely watch or listen to any of them (in the case of Chris Evans after his disastrous reboot of Top Gear), nor indeed many of those already on commercial networks also reputedly paid large sums, so it really will make zero difference to me.

Best of all, abolish the licence fee and replace it with subscriptions for those that wish to pay them, or take advertising. The BBC lost its way many years ago and while some aspects of it remain good, it does need a radical overhaul or outright replacement.