International Trade Secretary demands meeting with corporation's Director General over 'unbalanced' reporting

40 women have written an open letter to the BBC leadership to call for reforms

Stars call for change 'now' rather than by previous 2020 deadline

Forty-five per cent of top-earning staff privately educated - compared with seven per cent of nation overall

Six-episode series will air this autumn

Household names from television and radio come together in revolt over list of corporation's highest earners 

Please send your letters to letters@independent.co.uk

Lineker's representative Jon Holmes said the huge pay gap between men and women is the fault of the agents who represent the female talent and the broadcaster

Newsnight presenter was absent from BBC pay list, suggesting she does not earn over £150,000

'We have said again and again that there is a problem with excess pay and we need to address that'

Seven individuals are paid more than half a million pounds a year, all of which are male, and several female stars earn significantly less than their male co-presenters on the same show

The BBC’s governing body has a fiduciary duty to ensure that it doesn’t pay over the odds for its presenters, or for its accountants and its studio directors for that matter, and they should be accountable for that, via audit and managerial control, to licence payers – but not by an arbitrary release of private financial information

Some presenters working for privately-owned companies are reportedly paid significantly more

You are not entitled to the same salary as colleagues as a matter of course

‘I’m listed as having a salary between £700-750,000. How do you justify that?’

Salaries of Jimmy Fallon and other late night talk show hosts far exceed British rivals