Discussion for article #222780
Two weeks ago, after repeated stories in the Times and elsewhere about the lack of women in influential media positions, I wrote to Kay Steiger and asked her why TPM still looked like the set of Mad Men. No reply. Now I’m trying to imagine the debate at TPM about how to cover this story. Have the lone female senior figure do it? No, looks like tokenism. Have one of the (all male) reporting staff do it? No, check your privilege. Aha! Import a celebrity guest female.
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Yep. Guest. How nice for her.
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As answerfrog indicated, we really don’t know the details.
But when Ms. Marcotte says,
Among the heavily gendered critiques of Abramson that emerged during her tenure and bubbled to the surface again after news of her firing was that she was “pushy," “brusque,” and “aloof” – qualities frequently praised in men, especially those in leadership roles, but chastised in women.
she has an excellent point. We continue to use subtle language to marginalize women. Pushy, bossy, overbearing, etc. These are words that are rarely applied to men, but are often applied to women.
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Bingo. Don’t forget “strident” and “uppity.”
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Marcotte writes independently for several major publications so not sure it’s relevant. (She has her own history of irresponsbile speculation btw)
That said, I think your general critique of newsroom diversity is worthwhile considering.
Okay, TPM is not a gender-balanced as we’d like. But TPM is far from a all-male organization. Kay Steiger is one of the two senior editors in the organization. We have two female reporters. The director of our ad sales program is a woman, as is her deputy. Our General Counsel is a woman. I want it to be much closer to equal. But again, women work for TPM and they work in the highest levels of the organization on both sides of the company.
As for Amanda Marcotte, all our opinion pieces in TPMCafe are from non-staff. So any any opinion piece would have been by a “guest” as you put it. And Amanda frequently writes for us. She’s no import.
As I said, improving the gender balance at TPM is a very high priority for me personally. But you’re simply misstating the reality.
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Are we really going to shed tears over Abramson’s ouster? She managed to work to age 60 before getting the heave-ho. I can’t think of one person who’s that lucky. Besides, she’s still able to live comfortably in a NYC, and her severance package probably is in the millions. If anything, white women are doing just fine, with all their leaning in and gentrifying. Show me one black reporter Abramson hired during her tenure. Journalism is the bastion of whites, including white women. Most black reporters have been purged. Even the start-up online news services like Ezra Klein’s use the same excuses for not hiring blacks as corporations used 50 years ago. “There aren’t any qualified black writers.” She’ll land on her feet. And from what I can tell she was a pain to work for and treated Mr.Baquet like dirt.
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Thanks for the clarification about the opinion pieces. But when I look at the masthead on the editorial side, I do see a distinction between reporters (all male) and newswriters. Maybe it is not a meaningful distinction inside the newsroom, but it makes me wince a little. As I wrote to Kay, I am a longtime TPM reader and fan and it bugs me that TPM is not doing better on this.
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I think even the Times version makes the apparent sexism clear. Sure, it’s not a good idea to needlessly antagonize your senior staff. But if a manager gets fired because their boss thinks an underling might leave, and then that underlying immediately takes the manager’s job, it’s pretty clear that “underling” was not the right term, and that the manager was actually a placeholder.
On the one hand, this is the kind of internecine backstabbing that goes on at many large corporations, but on the other hand the pay-disparity thing makes it pretty clear where the Times’s beliefs lie.
Also, I wouldn’t take that statement from the Times about a settlement as a guarantee of anything. We don’t know exactly what its conditions are (and whether they’ve already been breached), what it covers and so forth.
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I wrote an essay in college (in 1997… so I have forgotten most of it) where I looked into the etymology for pejorative terms for women. Think of how many gender-specific pejorative terms we have for women! Furthermore, when you look at the etymology almost all of them started out as non-pejorative (the exception being the ones that refer to genetalia). Our language still exposes the deep history of misogyny in our culture, and how far we have to go.
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Using the word “female” rather than woman/women is a tell.
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Wait, you forgot “shrill” too!
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Did you miss the part where it’s been independently confirmed that Ms. Abramson asked for the same compensation that the previous managing editor got and was denied that? I’m not sure why we have to “imagine” other scenarios when the main point of contention–that she was getting paid less to do the same job–was confirmed.
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Both Female and Woman are often used as pejorative terms for women.
The New Yorker does not appear to have a dog in this fight; Ken Auletta is one of the best media reporters in the country; and it’s one of the most rigorously fact-checked publications out there. (Not only that, but there’s no scandal surrounding Ms. Abramson and the paper seems to be as profitable as is possible, which makes her sudden firing a little strange.)
If compensation didn’t have anything to do with the dispute, the Times would’ve made sure the word got out. Obviously, in contract disputes, no one’s going to go on the record. Auletta’s article is well-enough sourced for me–and there’s certainly more evidence for his version of events than for your imagined narrative.
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Actually, you specifically used the phrase “imagine that” in your post above, and used it to speculate that it wasn’t any of the (confirmed) facts that led to her firing, but other, non-objectionable things that no one has suggested actually happened.
Then you go on to suggest that maybe the mature (60 year old) senior executive “stormed out of the building” refusing to say goodbye.
Because strong, extremely effective adults (the Times earned EIGHT Pulitzers under her guidance in less than three years) so often behave that way, of course.
Seriously. Would you really have suggested that someone was lying about a man not being allowed to say goodbye to his employees because he obviously must have really just thrown a fit and stormed out of the building? Do you often assume that men are lying, or being lied about, because it’s so much more believable that they’re really just behaving hysterically?
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Of course, let’s not forget that we went though this same cycle with GM;s first female CEO and we all remember how substantive that ended up being.
Except for Chris Christie, at least among those who aren’t stuck in The Village.
They should have fired Maureen Dowd instead.
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