Was Abramson let go because she was “belligerent,” as some sources have indicated; due to her troubled relationship with Times publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr.; because she found out she was underpaid compared to male predecessors, complained about it, and then hired a lawyer to defend her position? Or maybe because she was simply disliked as a manager by her staff. Or was it some combination of all of the above.
There’s been so much media coverage of this story from so many different angles – complete with the requisite “he said/she said/it said” (“it” being NYT spokespeople on and off the record) – that we’ll probably never know exactly what happened, or why. Of course, that never stopped anyone from speculating.
One thing that doesn’t appear to be in dispute is the Times’s performance during Abramson’s brief, three-year tenure at the top. The paper won a number of Pulitzer Prizes under her stewardship and is by all accounts (including in the all-important category of digital coverage) way ahead of the pack in a rapidly evolving competitive landscape.
That said, Abramson’s departure resurrects a number of vexing issues about women in the workplace.
Equal Work for Unequal Pay?
Women in 2014 earn, on average, 77 cents on the dollar of what men make for doing equivalent work.
Abramson was perhaps justifiably upset when she discovered she was being paid considerably less than her male predecessor, Bill Keller; maybe even more so upon finding out she had been compensated at a lower level than male counterparts in both of her two prior appointments with the Times, as managing editor and Washington bureau chief, respectively.
The paper, seemingly caught flat-footed on the issue, maintains that “total compensation” (i.e., bonus, stock options and other perqs) needs to be considered in this argument; and that there was in fact parity between Abramson and Keller in those terms. Still, as Ken Auletta points out in his comprehensive coverage of the story in a recent issue of The New Yorker, when Abramson complained to Sulzberger and CEO Mark Thompson, her salary was increased – but not to what Keller had earned when he passed the reins to her in 2011. At that point, she engaged an outside attorney to represent her “interests” – the final tipping point for Sulzberger in showing her the exit.
Was it Really about Gender, in the End?
Auletta’s story also delves into assertions regarding Abramson’s alleged “brusque” and “abrasive” management style; how she did an end-around on her colleague Dean Baquet (the runner-up to Abramson in 2011 and now, somewhat ironically, her successor and the paper’s first African-American executive editor) by agreeing to hire a digital editor on a management level equivalent to his, without his knowledge (thereby incurring his wrath); and about Sulzberger’s often-contentious relationship with her, including an account of his hesitation over giving her the top spot to begin with.
And then, there are the inevitable questions about Abramson’s gender, and whether the Times treated her the way they might have dealt with a problematic male executive editor. In fact, there’s precedent for exactly that, which may have given Sulzberger and Thompson the confidence that they were “in the right.”
In 2003, then-executive editor Howell Raines – famous in the newsroom for his rancorous management style – was summarily fired amid revelations about the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal that badly tarnished the “Grey Lady’s” reputation for a time. By contrast, though, that dismissal was largely performance-related, although Raines’s purported arrogance had earned him a number of enemies in the newsroom.
Of course, female chief executives have been in the news consistently this year and last – first with Yahoo’s Marisa Mayer coming under fire for ending the company’s long-standing policy of workplace flexibility and allowing employees to tele-commute; later with her own much-touted dismissal of her second-in-command in January 2014 (whom she had recruited from Google, her former employer), accompanied by a seven-figure golden handshake.
This year, General Motors made headlines by appointing its first female CEO, Mary Barra – who had risen through the ranks and run a number of divisions before getting the nod. Of course, she’s been raked over the coals both by the media and in Congressional hearings regarding GM’s failure to resolve a faulty-ignition problem that led to multiple deaths, and ultimately to one of the largest auto recalls in the industry’s history.
The story began to take on a tone of “What did Barra know, and when did she know it?” Were her male predecessors directly responsible for GM’s failure to act in a timely way given equal treatment by the media? Thus far, it doesn’t seem so.
At the same time, a recent survey of women in endeavors from industry to politics to non-profit to labor organizing by public relations powerhouse Ketchum indicates strikingly favorable impressions of female leaders in a number of categories (See Forbes' write up of the survey here). Among these were communication, collaboration, transparency and other metrics where women outdid their male counterparts by significant margins. That would bode well for female executives and hiring managers across the board.
Still, the survey found that a plurality of respondents expect that a male U.S. President may still be a ways off in time. But considering that Hillary Clinton’s favorability ratings are at an all-time high and President Obama’s at an all-time low, it seems to many observers a foregone conclusion that she will run – with a better-than-even-money chance of occupying the Oval Office in 2016. In that scenario, a President Clinton would have to be paid at parity (by law) with President Obama.
Although that won't solve this issue across the country, it would be a step in the right direction.