Female spies are being paid much less to do the same frontline roles as male agents, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
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 are 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.
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GCHQ director Anne Keast-Butler is the first female boss of the agency – and its 17th overall – since its inception in 1919
Their work includes dealing with potential 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 earn salaries of up to £170,000, many of the junior staff earn around £30,000 a year.
MI5 boss Ken McCallum, GCHQ’s director general for strategy Katharine 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.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Dailymail.co.uk