BBC gender divide row: 31 men paid more than £200k...but only SIX women

There are also twice as many men on more than £100,000 at the BBC with the average man's pay at £41,916 while it is only £36,827 for a female employee.

The news came as the BBC Trust chairman Lord Patten said yesterday that ‘toxic’ high salaries for staff needed to stop and he signalled a pay cut for senior executives.

Lord Patten said he believed BBC managers’ high salaries were unpopular with viewers and licence fee payers.

The Daily Mail quotes former Tory cabinet minister Lord Patten as saying: “The biggest issue for the public is senior executive pay because what's happened does seem to fly in the face of public service ethos.

“There are four aspects which we will be making announcements about in the next few days.

“First of all, there’s the pay level at the very top; secondly, there's the number of people who get more than £150,000; thirdly, there’s the number of people who are deemed to be senior managers; and, fourthly, there’s the whole issue of fairness across the board, with senior managers getting some deals which don't apply to others.

“We can deal with all that and if we do so, we will deal with one of the most toxic reasons for the public's lack of sympathy with the BBC as an institution.”

The Daily Mail claims that campaigners have branded the gender pay gap typical of the BBC –which was forced to pay £150,000 to 53-year-old Country file presenter Miriam O'Reilly after a tribunal found they had sacked her for being too old.

The tabloid continued: ”Anna Bird, acting chief executive of the Fawcett Society, which campaigns for gender equality, said: 'The persistent gap in pay between men and women is one of the starkest examples of inequality in the UK today’.”

The Daily Mail said that the BBC pays 31 full-time male staff more than £200,000 a year - compared to only six women.

And 234 men earn over £100,000 - more than double the 114 women.

The BBC has persistently come in for criticism for axing a string of female presenters - including Strictly Come Dancing judge Arlene Phillips, 68, and dropping veteran newsreader Moira Stewart, 61.

The newspaper stated that Lord Patten, Britain's last governor of Hong Kong and a former Conservative Party chairman, hailed research by former journalist Will Hutton, of the Work Foundation, into a Government proposal to limit top public servants' pay to no more than 20 times that of their lowest paid staff.

Speaking on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show, Lord Patten said: “I will be looking very closely at what Will Hutton said about top pay in the public sector - there were some very good ideas.”

He added: “You look at the relationship between top pay and median pay and I would like the BBC to be the first organisation in the public sector which gets into implementing some of Will Hutton's ideas.”

Lord Patten took over as chairman of the BBC Trust - the corporation's governing body and charged with protecting licence fee payers' interests - in May and said he wanted a “more flexible, leaner” BBC which was “aware of the principles on which it was founded”.

He said it was “a fantastic organisation”, but advocated that it should “take out a lot of costs” and learn to live within its £3.5 billion budget - funded by the £145.50p licence fee.

“Everybody has to pull in their belts and I hope we can pull in ours while still producing high-quality programmes,“ said Lord Patten.

“We are looking at how much we can get through greater efficiencies, through greater productivity, and how much will involve us stopping doing things we would like to do but which are probably expendable.”

He admitted that channel and station closures were possible, but praised much-criticised BBC3 which screens shows such as World's Craziest Fools, Don't Tell the Bride and Kids Behind Bars.

Lord Patten said: “People have sometimes been very critical of BBC3. I have watched in the last few weeks a couple of fantastic programmes on BBC3 - one on young offenders and another on Afghanistan. They were brilliant programmes.”