It's not an opinion.
Firstly some basic stats - most people hopefully know this but it's worth a reminder.
Mean pay iis the "average" that most people are familiar with. Add up the pay and divide by the number of people.
Small groups can skew results. Imagine a class of 5 pupils doing a maths test and little Joe does really badly. The mean is affected far more than if he had been in a class of 30.
Median pay is the one in the middle. Line everyone up in order of their pay and take the middle person.If there are 99 people, you would take the 50th person.
49 before, 49 after.
If you have 6 people, you would need the average of the 3rd and 4th person.
There are 2 tables.
Table 1 shows the mean and median pay gap across all different groups for 2024 and 2025
For ethnicity, the mean was 2.0% which means white employees are paid on average 2% more than ethnic minorities
The median was 0.7%. So the middle white person was paid 0.7% more than the middle ethnic minority employee
But then they decided to sub divide the groups by Band. They didn't do that for any other characteristic but they did for ethnicity. I am sure the person who compiled it had their reasons.
This is table 2.
In table 2, you can see a negative pay gap which means the mean is in favour of ethnic minorities and the median is as well.
You'll see that the median for Band A is -13.2% which means the middle ethnic minority employee is paid 13.2% more than the median white employee
It's similar for the other bands, except Band F, although the percentage differences are lower. The median ethnic senior leader earns 5.3% more.
They've also gone deeper into the ethnic groups.
Table 3
Asian employees earn 2.7% more than - either white employees or non Asian. It doesn't say.However black employees earn 8.5% less than white or non Black (sorry) employees.
As I said, the number of people matters when you are trying to compare groups using statistics. Small groups can be impacted by one person.
They haven't given us the numbers. What they have done is give us the percentage of ethnic minorities in each pay quartile. It's roughly 20%.
This means there could be 10 employees in each quartile and 2 of them would be from an ethnic minority. But the BBC has about 40,000 employees so we can assume about 20% are from an ethnic minority. Which is 8000 people.
What we have is called Simpson's Paradox.
When a group is combined, one group has a higher mean or median than the other group.
When you divide the group into categories, such as employee Band, the opposite is true.
So in this case, white employees earn more on average than ethnic minority ones.
But at each pay band, ethnic minorities earn more on average than white employees.
It's impossible to give an answer without the actual data and it needs to be presented in a more visual way.
Interestingly, the pay gap for LGBT Senior Leaders is 8.8% in favour of the LGBT employees. I bet that's one highly paid person.
If you want to reduce the pay gap, it's very simple but harsh.
You need fewer lower paid workers in the disadvantaged group and more lower paid workers in the advantaged group.
So you sack all the lower paid ethnic minority employees thus shifting the mean and median higher.
You employ more higher paid ethnic minority workers.
You replace them with lower paid white workers and you sack higher paid white workers thus lowering their mean and median.
As long as you pay people the same for the band and job they are doing, that's guaranteed to reduce the pay gap.
Of course, the media looked at the report, They ignored the headline figure about white employees earning more and reported the more detailed figure by Career Band.
Simpsons Paradox - it can affect loads of things iespecially when comparing outcomes
eg 1 Dr A could have a better outcome for operations than Dr B
But if it was a high risk operation, Dr B is better than Dr A