The New York Times’ decision to fire its executive editor is another in a long line of questionable moves involving discrimination.
On Wednesday, The New York Times fired executive editor Jill Abramson after just three years on the job. Abramson was the first female executive editor of the Times and, according to the Times story published this morning, was forced out for several different reasons, including repeated clashes with managing editor Dean Baquet – who is replacing her, becoming the first African American to ever head the Times newsroom – and, as publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in the newsroom before offering the job to Baquet, an “issue with management in the newsroom”.
But a New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta shed some light on what happened behind the scenes at the Times, and it doesn’t directly correlate with the official story.
Auletta writes that Abramson had asked only a few weeks ago about why her pay and benefits were remarkably less than that of the man she replaced, Bill Keller:
Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect.
While the Times’ reasoning for the disparity in pay is that Keller had more experience than Abramson, as well as Sulzberger insisting on cutting costs, the fact remains that Abramson was widely credited for having pushed the Times to new heights regarding investigative journalism, resulting in eight Pulitzers for the paper in her short reign as top editor.
The New York Times, for all the “liberal media” flack it takes from conservative thinkers, has never been progressive when it comes to bridging the gap between men and women, both in pay and actual coverage. The Times were sued in 1978 for discriminatory practices, and Laurie Peterson at AOL wrote about her experience in the 1980’s with the top brass:
Programmers had hung a poster of a naked woman on the wall and the lone female programmer found it offensive. Somehow, perhaps as the most senior female manager in the division, I was called into the matter and became a designated representative of the Times Women’s Caucus, a forum established as a direct result of the affirmative action lawsuit, which was settled for $350,000 in 1978 and chronicled in reporter Nan Robertson’s book “The Girls in the Balcony.”…
The primary focus of the conversation that day was young female interns and the male managing editors who were pursuing them. I don’t think we ever got around to the topic of the girly poster in the tech space. If we did, I can’t remember what was said.
And in a 2014 report by the Women’s Media Center that was reported on by Salon, the New York Times came in dead last in male-to-female gender bylines.
The biggest piece of irony, however, is that the Times published an op-ed by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan that explores the gender gap and concludes that there’s only two reasons why women aren’t making as much money as men: traditional gender roles, and the tendency of men to be more (even over) confident in the workplace. Mullainathan’s report ends with this assertion:
Maybe we shouldn’t be asking when women will catch up. Maybe they’ve already caught up, and we should instead ask whether society is holding them back.
All of the historical evidence points to this being a major problem throughout the New York Times’ history, that it’s struggled to shed its boys’ club attitude even as the rest of society began to progress. And with Abramson’s firing, one has to wonder if the New York Times is representative of the traditional ge that Mullainathan talks about. If I were her, I’d be wondering that.
Photo Credit – samchills/Flickr
As in any of these situations, there are several sides to the story including, always, personality and possibly petty issues. Unfortunately, our current culture is one of great diminished loyalty and arbitrary ego driven decision making based on personal issues, prejudices, likes and dislikes as well as the belief, mistaken as it is, that people are disposable. Having said all that, she might not have been worth the raise she was seeking, or “management” decided they could manage without having to pay her what she is worth. This might be more of a statement on our heartless culture and politics,… Read more »
Here is an interesting blast from the past: Strange Justice, The selling of Clarence Thomas by Jane Mayer and Jill Abramson http://articles.latimes.com/1994-11-13/books/bk-61927_1_clarence-thomas-mayer-and-abramson-strange-justice Irony: Abramson has been replaced by a black man… From the review: “Mayer and Abramson have also spent a considerable amount of time examining the lives, loves, careers and ambitions of Thomas and Hill. Thomas comes out as an often brooding, angry and contrary man who years ago set his sights on replacing Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court, and who would stop at little–including going to the hospital bed of NAACP lobbyist Althea Simmons–to get her endorsement… Read more »
We don’t know who she passed up when making those promotions. Qualified may not mean most qualified. We don’t know to what extent gender played a part. Is that why she cut other people out of the hiring decisions? The NYT is heavily slanted towards male so you would think that promotions would roughly mirror the composition of the subordinates / staff. Yet, she achieved “gender parity” in three years, but only at the highest levels. “So unless you count women being in positions of power as “discrimination against men”, that claim is patently false ” No what I find… Read more »
“Abramson was committed to increasing women’s representation at the paper, and she got results. In 2013 alone, Abramson tapped political editor Carolyn Ryan to replace David Leonhardt as Washington bureau chief and replaced national editor Sam Sifton with weekend editor Alison Mitchell. She also handed over the reins at the Sunday Book Review from Sam Tanenhaus to Pamela Paul, who has since made enormous strides in representing women, both female authors and critics, in the review. Abramson created a race and ethnicity beat at the paper, tapping national correspondent Tanzina Vega to cover it, and poached star local D.C. reporter… Read more »
Nothing in any of that even remotely suggests discrimination against men. It suggests a concerted effort to increase the visibility of women at a paper that has historically had little of it. You’re assuming that Abramson went in and fired people simply because they were men. As the Salon article states, women were still massively underrepresented at the NYT, even with Abramson’s efforts. So unless you count women being in positions of power as “discrimination against men”, that claim is patently false. Vega and Stewart were additions that didn’t replace anyone, and the three women who were replacing men were… Read more »
Here you go.
http://pagesix.com/2014/05/22/hiring-too-many-women-may-have-been-a-factor-in-abramson-firing/
One guy – who is an opinion writer for the New York Post – saying that she hired too many women/fired too many men = proof that she was hiring too many women. Got it. I’m sure Bill Keller was forced out for hiring too many men, too.
half staff turn over … wish someone at my POB would look at that. Adolescent unit has had more then 80% turn over since a female coordinator took over three years ago. The unit, which is for adolescent boys, has only one male counselor, where as when she started, we had 5.
Nearly every article I’ve read about this (and there were many, from both sides of this issue) admitted that the paper under her stewardship was reaching new journalistic heights, resulting, as I noted, in 8 Pulitzers in less than 3 years. And if we’re talking about the revenue model, maybe someone who knows more about that can enlighten me, but the Times has a CEO and I’m assuming that’s their responsibility, not the executive editors. So no, performance was not the issue. It’s disingenuous to suggest that. What has come up is the pay (the NYT responded and said she… Read more »
This article was pretty good. However, I do not appreciate all the defensive, male chauvinistic responses to it. And this is why I do not like The Good Man Project. A good man takes equal responsibility for patriarchy and does not get defensive during discussions about discrimination against women.
I’m not responsible for Abramson using her attorney for salary negotiations. Guess that makes me a pretty crappy chauvinist.
I appreciate the compliment, but the commenters and writers here are completely separate entities. I enjoy engaging the commenters and having civil discussions with them, because I have a lot to learn from people I fundamentally disagree with, but they don’t represent my views or the views of anyone else at the Good Men Project. So, give it another shot. Or don’t. Either way, thanks for reading.
In the absence of compelling evidence that she was either fired or being paid less because of her gender, it’s a good idea not to make assumptions. She seemed, according to the Times piece today, to be underperforming . . . though I have no special insight on that either. From a more macro perspective, though, the NYT seems to be in a world of hurt. They still haven’t figured out a revenue model that works.
It’s entirely possible that she was fired because of sexual discrimination. Based on this article, though, I can see some pretty good alternative explanations. That part of the story about the interns and the nude picture is a bit of a red herring, though, unless you can actually connect that incident to her case. The fact that a woman in a position makes less than a man in the same position is not necessarily due to gender difference. The “just three years on the job” could be the main point here — could the difference be experience and seniority? If… Read more »
New York Magazine had a nice summation of publisher Aurthur Sulzberger Jr., CEO Mark Thompson, and Abramson’s past disputes: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/05/sulzberger-swings-the-axe-why-he-fired-abramson.html
Didn’t she had her attorney confront her employer? I doubt anyone here will understand the level of confrontation involved in that move or, if they do, they will rationalize around why the lawyer was necessary… Long story short- I’d be fired if I did it and so would you. You don’t “pull a gun” on anyone if you don’t intend to use it and I don’t think you can blame the NYT for firing someone who “pulled a gun” on em.
Often people make less than others they replace.
First I heard of this was on FOX but they too it a little further and showed that MANY of the liberal media outlets clearly have a problem with women and minorities. I had to LOL because FOX is usually the one that’s being questioned and low and behold,all they had to do is look in their own back yards. Now, as to what CW was saying. In the good old days, when I was in the big bad corporate world, it was called negotiating a contract. I would imagine my female predecessors may very well have been paid less… Read more »
One thing to have a lawyer reviewing a contract prior to acceptance…whole other kettle of fish to have one ring up your boss