SAMIRA AHMED has been at the centre of the landmark equal pay case at BBC, winning last year an employment tribunal order in favour of her. The corporation reached a settlement with Ahmed a month later for an undisclosed sum.
The tribunal in its ruling said BBC has failed to prove the disparity in pay between Samira Ahmed and Jeremy Vine, who presents a similar show, was “because of a material factor which did not involve subjecting the claimant to sex discrimination.” Dismissing BBC’s claims, the judges noted that there were only “minor differences” in what the two presenters did in their respective shows.
Newswatch presenter Ahmed’s case was that she was paid one sixth of the fee earned by Vine who presents Points of View, arguing that she was owed almost £700,000 in back pay.
Both shows give viewers an opportunity to comment on BBC programmes, with Points of View covering the whole spectrum whereas Newswatch deals with the news coverage.
Ahmed, who cut her teeth at BBC as a graduate trainee, has always been a highly valued presenter at the corporation. She has in fact talked about the influence of BBC in her childhood, making her – ‘born of immigrants’, a Pakistani father and an Indian mother – realise that people like her were welcome. “And people like me could have a career at the BBC, which was for everybody.”
The sense of justice inherent in that sentence explains her brave decision to challenge her employer on the gross inequalities in pay between men and women. It had been a tough two years-plus for her, but the battle has never diminished the sense of ‘incredible affection’ for BBC she has developed growing up.
“No woman wants to have to take action against their own employer. I love working for the BBC,” she has said after the tribunal verdict. “I’m glad it’s been resolved. I’m now looking forward to continuing to do my job, to report on stories and not being one.”
Ahmed has done exactly that, and in March 2020, a month after the settlement, she was named the British Broadcasting Press Guild Audio Presenter of the Year. Later in the year, BBC Four aired her three part documentary Art of Persia, which was the first major Western documentary series shot in Iran for 40 years.
Ahmed boasts an impressive journalistic career. She uncovered a major charity fraud and was one of the first broadcast journalists to investigate the rise of Islamic radicalism on British university campuses in the early 1990s. She won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year Award in 2009 for her film on so-called “corrective” rape of lesbian women in South Africa.
She was a presenter and reporter at Channel 4 News from 2000 to 2011, and made the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary series Islam Unveiled. Samira has also worked as a news anchor for Deutsche Welle TV in Berlin, and writes regularly for The Guardian, TheIndependent and The Big Issue.
