The Gap In Pay For Female Spies

A newspaper outlet revealed that female spies are being paid much less to do the same frontline roles as male agents.

Figures from MI5, where 47 per cent of staff are women, reveal a 16 per cent gender pay gap.

A third of spies at MI6, the Secret Intelligence Service, are women but they’re paid 7.3 per cent less, and the pay gap is 11 per cent at listening centre GCHQ, where a third of staff are women.

Women are employed as agent handlers, intelligence officers and surveillance operatives, some of the most important roles in intelligence work.

Their work includes dealing with possible sources who are prepared to speak only to women.

Earlier this year Anne Keast-Butler became GCHQ’s first director.

MI5 has also had two female chiefs, but a woman has yet to be appointed as ‘C’, the codename for the head of MI6.

While the chiefs make salaries of up to £170,000, many of the junior staff earn about £30,000 a year.

MI5 boss Ken McCallum, GCHQ’s director general for strategy Katherine Hammond, and Sir Richard Moore, the head of MI6, said there was still work to be done on both equal gender representation and the pay gap.

If women stopped working tomorrow there would be a blip, if men stopped working we would be living in caves and the deceased would be in a cliff of carcasses.

I read somewhere, which I found particularly funny that ‘women don’t exist no more’. Evidently, neither does the English language or good grammar.

Of course, not everyone works for MI6 and is a spy, and I’m guessing that a female working environment is relatively new and that it was originally a male-dominated institution. However, I can’t imagine that the pay gap for women is lower just because they’re women, can you? But then it’s always been more James Bond, than Jane Bond.

Typically, all government positions were put on a pay band, so I’m not sure how this gender gap came about. But then this is media reporting and like all media reporting only about 78 per cent of their stories are true. It either didn’t happen, or it didn’t happen anything vaguely like it was reported.

Equal pay means that men and women performing equal work, or work of equal value, must receive equal pay, and equal pay has been a legal requirement for decades and is presently covered by the Equality Act 2010. However, even though it’s an Act of parliament, it doesn’t always get adhered to.

The media continue to amaze me, coming up with subjects that make these disclosures. What happened to general news or information of significant importance to the people?

It only takes one man to say that men are more intelligent than women, and then you have all the male sheep following.

Perhaps we should all go back to good old traditional family values, where men worked and supported the family and women looked after the children and the home. That children should be seen and not heard, and men could beat their wives and children into oblivion without any repercussions. What do you think? It isn’t so nice when you say it out loud, is it?

I guess, this would be great for dinosaurs, but we know what happened to them!

Since the beginning of time, women have been brainwashed that taking care of their children, husband and household is what they were supposed to do, what they were born to do. Of course, men are needed, not just for procreation or recreation, but because it gives us women something to do!