When the BBC’s China editor Carrie Gracie found out she was earning much less than her male colleagues, she decided to do the unthinkable: take on her employer

‘Being mad and bad,’ Carrie Gracie writes towards the end of Equal, her account of a year-long struggle to get the BBC to pay her the same as her male counterparts, “is exhausting.” Eating chorizo hash in an upscale breakfast spot near Broadcasting House in London, where she’s about to go on shift, Gracie doesn’t look mad, or bad, or even exhausted. Indeed, she’s recently returned from a holiday in Majorca during which she hopped over to Ibiza and was snapped clubbing with her news colleague, Simon McCoy. One might even say she looks pretty perky.

She was referring to that moment in a battle when you have to convince your opponent that you are willing to do what it takes to achieve your goal; that you will not blink, or back down, or slink away. And on 4 June 2018, when her grievance appeal was turned down with no further option but litigation, Gracie didn’t blink; she threatened war. When the BBC responded by sending a senior executive to her house to negotiate, she hid the washing up and the dog’s toys, shooed her teenage son upstairs and turned her garden sprinkler on to hide the unmown grass. “Imagine the home of a single parent locked in a long battle with her employer and suffering depression as a result,” she writes. “That’s what my house looked like.” It didn’t matter. The BBC had agreed to pay parity, and to backdate the consequent increase. She had won.