Rip Off Ou Quoi ?

Statistician Graeme Archer enters the debate about gender at the BBC - sparked by articles in which it was revealed that Julia Somerville, Gloria Hunniford and Angela Rippon get around £1,000 each per episode of "Rip Off Britain", whilst it seems to work out at around £40,000 for the pleasure of Alan Hansen's thoughts on each Match of The Day.  And the audience is sometimes bigger for "Rip Off Britain".

Here's the core of Graeme's argument.

"There are plenty of men who present programmes about buying things, surely? And I'm sure I've seen women talking on sports programmes. It would only be sexism if either the BBC refused to let women do sport or men do consumer affairs, or, since they do permit the genders to mix within genre, if the within-genre pay was set lower for women than men. Now, that might be the case (which the BBC could address by doing what it ought to have done years ago, and telling us how our money is spent). But the fact that there are two uni-gender programmes of different genres doesn't tell us whether it is the case or not, and nor does the price per presenter within a genre tell us anything of institutional instinct, either: it may just be that there are more people available to read an autocue with regard to broken washing machines, than there are to comment on the fascinating world of competitive sport. 


Unless, of course, the BBC lost a high profile sexism/ageism case last year, and decided to make amends by cobbling together a programme about the perils of buying white goods, to be presented "at random" (where "at random" means "not at all at random") by three older female presenters, and subconsciously decided not to pay them very much as a deferred insult. Absence of evidence, after all, isn't evidence of… etc etc"