Like any movement today, there’s criticism. That was mainly focused on how redistributing the BBC stars’ money isn’t the most pressing job when it comes to equality, especially considering their already-six-figure salaries. But talking on Elizabeth Day’s How To Fail podcast, Garvey made such an excellent point about why it was so important to speak out: “I really do feel strongly that I had been completely blind to what was happening around me and if it was happening to me, a white… middle, middle class woman with vocal skills, what the hell would be happening to women of colour, whether they work at the BBC or anywhere else? What would be happening to women now juggling three or four zero-hour contract jobs and trying to bring up their children in inadequate social housing?”

Garvey added: “It’s because we have a voice at the BBC that I feel this absolute fervour, the closest I’ve ever come to fervour in my life, that if we can’t fight this battle when women at Glasgow City Council, for example, have done it, women at Birmingham City Council and some of the major supermarkets, they have done it, if women like that have done it, then for us to not even try to cause a stink would just be the most appalling failure.”

While Garvey is obviously proud of the work that she did, she said that doesn’t think of her equal pay work as a win. She told Day that one of her biggest failures was to appreciate fully what women were really up against in terms of pay until the BBC figures were made public. One reason for that was because she didn’t have to suffer the hardship faced by the women of past generations, and had never lived in poverty or destitution, so assumed everything was OK. “I had my head down. I was trying to do everything right as far as I could for the children. I was also trying to do my job, keep my job. There’s no guarantee that once you’ve got a job like a presenter on Radio 4 that you’ll always have a fantastic job so I wasn’t thinking or even wondering very much about how much I was paid for what I did, I was just trying to do it well enough to keep it.” This feeling of keeping our head above water, always needing to do better, not wanting to rock the boat is so common that it has a name: imposter syndrome.

Jane Garvey explains why it was so important for her to talk about the gender pay gap at the BBC