Cutting The Boys’ Pay To Give More To The Girls

For Poynter, Kelly McBride writes about Jill Abramson’s plans for a new venture, wherein she will pay writers around $100k (?!?!?) to write big stories that lie in that heretofore unmarketable place between very long articles and books. She’d publish one a month in some sort of subscription model. Sounds great, don’t think it will ever work but hopefully I will eat my words.

Anyway at the very end of said Poynter article, McBride adds this little aside that is kind of after-the-fact and also besides the point but I’m dying:

After her speech I asked her what newsroom leaders should do who inherit pay inequalities, but lack the ability to give raises. “You bring the guys down to give a little more to the girls,” she said. “I did that at The Times. No one’s happy to get a cut, but too bad.”

TOO BAD.

I don’t know much about Jill Abramson but this is amazing. She gave men pay cuts and gave that money to underpaid women. Like, sorry nevermind, we will be taking some of your money back and giving it to the “girls.” I am repeating myself because I can’t imagine being sat down by someone and saying, “You know what, I think we are paying you too much and we are paying some other people too little so um, your pay is going down. Hope you enjoyed it while it lasted!” I don’t think I would be very happy about that.

But, as Jill Abramson would say: TOO BAD.

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