Lisa Wilkinson: Watch the gap and don’t overstep; TV’s gender war

Morning TV. It’s meant to be all bright and breezy, with hosts who get on a like a house on fire. The reality?

‘In all my time on the show, I had never given anyone a moment’s grief,’ says former Today co-host Lisa Wilkinson. Picture: Jonathan Ng

Morning TV. It’s meant to be all bright and breezy, with hosts who get on a like a house on fire.

The reality?

Well, we know from Hunter S. Thompson that the TV business is a place where good people go to die. We know from The Morning Show that bitter rivalries run beneath it all, like a toxic river.

Now comes former Today show host Lisa Wilkinson with a book outlining her experiences.

Wilkinson was, she says, a competent, capable magazine editor already into her 40s when she was asked to pair with Karl Stefanovic on Nine’s Today show.

She says she hoped they could be friends as well as colleagues.

For 10 years, she writes, she got up at three in the morning to host alongside him. Never once was she drunk on set. Always the “good girl”, she knew the name of every guest, and why they were there.

For this, she says, she was repeatedly shafted on pay, with the gap between her salary and Stefanovic’s “so off the charts, nobody would believe it”.

She thought it incredibly unfair. “They’d tried Karl in four other combinations before me, and for whatever reason, it hadn’t worked,” she writes in It Wasn’t Meant To Be Like This (HarperCollins).

“I started, and we worked. Not Karl on his own, not me on my own. Us. Together.”

It wasn’t just money she wasn’t getting. “At every turn, Karl was given all the breaks, opportunities that I was not. The 60 Minutes assignments. The prime-time shows. The Olympics. I had put my hand up for the possibility of all of those and been told ‘no’.”

One day she decided to take a stand, and I guess we all know how that ended. Now, of course there will be those who say well, cry me a river, Lisa.

Wilkinson and Karl Stefanovic. Picture Andrew Tauber

Maybe she wasn’t earning as much as Stefanovic but she was, according to some reports – coyly unconfirmed in the book — earning $780,000 a year from Nine, plus she had side-hustles, bringing her salary to well over $1m. But that, she says, is not the point. They were doing the same job.

Now, some will say only up to a point, because TV isn’t like other businesses. Yes, they both had to get up at cock’s crow, and ham it for hours, but some personalities – and you’d have to think that Nine thinks Stefanovic is one of them – have what is known as the X-factor. It’s undefinable, intangible, incorporeal. It’s pizzazz.

On some level, Wilkinson gets this. “In all my time on the show, I had never given anyone a moment’s grief,” she writes. “Just nice magazine covers … hopefully good journalism, and always, always the smiling, supportive team player sitting right by Karl’s side.”

Stefanovic had a very different role to play. Even when he was drunk at the Logies – maybe ­because he got drunk at the Logies – the audience thought he was adorable.

That’s gendered, too, of course: there is just no way Wilkinson – a mother of three – could have survived turning up half-cut, unable to read the idiot card. But still, they’d climbed to the No. 1 breakfast spot together.

Wilkinson says she sometimes tried to tell people she didn’t really know what Stefanovic was earning but now admits “that was bullshit”.

She knew, because a Seven Network executive told her what they had offered when they tried to lure him from Nine. She felt dazed. So how big was the gender gap? You have to do a little reading between the lines, but at the time of the pay dispute, it seems Stefanovic’s new contract would see him earning at least $2m a year, and maybe as much as $3m a year, for between three and five years. So, that’s between $6m and a staggering $15m.

If Lisa was getting $780,000 a year for two years … well, you do the maths. She really was in the shade.

She decided to tackle the issue.

“I wasn’t even asking for Karl’s pay, I was just asking for a slightly fairer share of the spoils that had come from the Today show’s increasingly profitable position in the hugely lucrative breakfast TV market – even more so now that we were at No. 1,” she writes.

“We were a show turning over $60m a year, with well over half of that in profit. But it was the massive gap between Karl and me that was at issue. By staying quiet, I would be complicit in perpetuating the gender pay gap for every woman who came after me.”

Nine’s CEO Hugh Marks said at the time he tried to put a better deal together, offering $1.8m a year while allowing Wilkinson to keep the side deals, some of which, like her role at Huffpost Australia, prevented her from working on Nine’s digital properties. When she pushed for more, they let her go.