Yesterday the New York Times announced Executive Editor Jill Abramson has been fired and is being replaced with NYT Managing Editor Dean Baquet. Abramson was the first woman to hold the top job at the NYT and was in the position for just under three years. For years the NYT has published op-ed after op-ed berating Americans for paying women less than men (a false argument), but it turns out Abramson was significantly underpaid compared to her male equivalents. More from the New Yorker:
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. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson, who spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, had been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, which accounted for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories. Whether Abramson was right or wrong, both sides were left unhappy. A third associate told me, “She found out that a former deputy managing editor”—a man—“made more money than she did” while she was managing editor. “She had a lawyer make polite inquiries about the pay and pension disparities, which set them off.”
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Oops. We could ask the question about whether Abramson was worth as much as her male counterparts, which would determine whether she was getting ripped off by her employer, but screeching liberals have told us we aren't allowed to consider qualification, work hours, employment history, etc. when it comes to pay differences between employees, specifically between men and women. Liberals can't have it both ways. They either have to pay men and women the exact same rate regardless of qualifications and worth or, they must recognize different factors for individuals and their employment determine how much someone, male or female, gets paid.
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