‘Good Morning Britain’ presenter Susanna Reid has urged ITV to follow the BBC’s lead and publicly reveal its highest-earning stars’ salaries.
Earlier this year, as part of a new government initiative, the publicly-owned BBC was required to make its top-paid staff members’ salaries public for the first time, which revealed that only a third of the corporation’s highest earners were women.
Susanna - who famously left the BBC’s breakfast show in 2014 to front ‘GMB’ on rival channel ITV - has now addressed the gender pay gap in the world of television, in a new interview with the Daily Mail.
Lambasting the disparity between men and women’s pay, she explained: “The pay reveal is both shocking and completely unsurprising. Many women know they aren’t paid equally to men doing the same job. Gender should not be a reason for paying anyone differently.
Susanna went on to suggest that she was unaware whether co-presenter Piers Morgan was being paid more than her, adding: “It is hard for women fighting an equality pay battle to find out what the person they might be sitting next to is paid.
Amid the backlash over the gender pay gap back in July, Susanna swerved a question about how much she was paid during an interview with Trisha Goddard on ‘Good Morning Britain’.
When Trisha said she “assumed” that Susanna and Piers were on the same wage, the former ‘Strictly’ star briefly paused, before stating: “I wouldn’t know, because we [at ITV] don’t have the same obligation of transparency.”
The BBC’s salary reveal also shone a light on the lack of racial diversity among its top-earning stars, with only 10 of the 96 ‘on-air’ names earning more than £150,000 being from black or minority ethnic backgrounds.