Fully 55 years after adoption of the 1964 Civil Rights Act -- made possible after 1000 arrests here in St. Augustine -- so many employers still discriminate. Thanks to the Guild for exposing unequal pay at The Washington Post. I've asked for years, nicely, that the City of St. Augustine and nther local employers adopt comparable worth principles and remedy employment discrimination. I reckon there will have to be litigation, as when EEOC recently sued RANDALL RINGHAVER's RING POWER for race discrimination. From WAMU and the DCist:
Washington Post Union Report Cites Pay Disparities Across Gender And Race
Christian Zapata
Rachel Sadon
Members of The Washington Post’s union released a report this week that details large discrepancies in salary between white men and women and people of color.
The median salary for women is about $18,000 less than men, according to The Washington Post Newspaper Guild, which found that the gender pay discrepancy almost exclusively exists among journalists under 40.
As a collective group, employees of color also earn less than their counterparts. The study found that women of color in the newsroom, for example, are paid 35% less than white men — around $30,000 — when comparing median salaries.
The Washington Post has never conducted and released to the public a comprehensive pay study.
So this year, in the absence of a Post-sponsored audit, the Post Guild decided to do one itself. postguild.org/2019-pay-study/
But the report notes that controlling for age, which the Guild used as a stand-in for experience, does “close the gap significantly between white men and men of color and also between white women and women of color.” The discrepancy in gender pay, however, remained “fairly consistent.”
In addition to disparities in pay, the Guild found a striking lack of diversity in salaried positions at the Post. More than 70% of salaried workers are white, per the report. Black employees make up 8.8%, Asian employees 8.3%, Hispanic or Latino employees 4.7% and employees with two or more races 2%.
“The members of the Post Guild believe that true progress can only be achieved when we begin with the facts. And the facts tell us that The Post has a problem with pay disparity,” the report reads.
Management broadly disputed the Guild’s findings in a statement, calling it “seriously flawed.” Kristine Coratti Kelly, vice president of communications at the Post, said in an emailed statement that the report left out relevant factors that it considers when determining employee salaries including position, years of experience and performance.
“It is regrettable that the Guild published a report on pay that does not appear to accurately account for these and other relevant factors, which have nothing to do with race or gender. In fact, the Guild concedes that its study’s ‘topline numbers such as median salary by gender or race and ethnicity cannot capture the entire story of pay at The Post,’” she said. “It is disappointing that the Guild chose to issue it. The Post told the Guild before its release that we had many questions about their methodology.”
Kelly did not elaborate to DCist on what aspects of the study are flawed.
Katie Mettler, a national general assignment reporter and the co-chair of news for the Guild, pushed back on the criticism.
“Of course we would never dock the company for awarding people who are high performers, but I think it’s unfair to say that the data and the analysis we did was inaccurate solely because we were unable to factor in experience, particularly because the company did not give us information on experience.” Mettler said.
The Guild’s reporting effort was led by Steven Rich, a Pulitzer Prize-winning data journalist, and it included 28 other staffers who looked at salary data provided by management in July. The team said it analyzed 950 positions that are eligible for membership in the union, 707 of which are salaried positions.
The only area where women and men were found to earn the same is in the Posts’ commercial division. That, however, is met with inequalities across race and ethnicity — the median salary for white employees is $88,000 and $83,445 for people of color—as well as a wider age discrepancy that suggests some workers of color are paid less despite having more experience.
This is not the first pay study the Guild has conducted. In 2016, it also identified pay disparities across the paper’s staff. At the time, Post management dismissed the results and declined an invitation by the Guild to address the issues collaboratively, according to the report.
While the report notes that pay discrepancies at the paper have narrowed since the mid-1900s, when it was still owned by the Graham family, it maintains that pay during the era of billionaire owner Jeff Bezos still cannot be considered equal.
Rich said via email that the Guild would consider gaps within a few percentage points to be effectively equal, because there are always exceptions when it comes to pay.
In a narrative section of the report, anonymous employees described some of their experiences firsthand.
“We don’t know what we should be paid, because no one tells you that in college,” said a woman who is described as a 35-year-old award-winning journalist who started at the Post in the mid-2000s. “You take what you’re offered, and then you’re on this track.”
A man on her team currently earns more than $30,000 above her salary, according to the report, and she said she had only gotten a substantial raise after getting a competing offer.
“It’s always disgusted me that the only way we can get what we deserve is by getting an offer somewhere else,” she said. “How is that a way to show that you value someone?”
Mettler said including employee voices was a key part of showing how pay disparity affects employees on an individual level.
“It was really important for us to recognize that conversations of pay and pay equity cannot be solely based on the data,” said Mettler. “The numbers can’t necessarily tell the full story, and that’s why we provided the testimony section, as well. We do that in journalism stories. We don’t publish raw data and call it journalism, we look for the people that are affected by the patterns we see in data.”
The Post is not the first newsroom to grapple with apparent pay discrepancies.
Last year, the union representing employees at the Los Angeles Times released a similar pay studythat looked at positions eligible for the collective bargaining unit. It also found that women and people of color are paid less than white men and, even when controlling for age and job title.
At the Post, Guild members recommended that the company eliminate the news intern program (which hires former interns for two years at a lower salary), stop asking people how much they earned at their previous jobs and institute periodic salary reviews, among other suggestions.
“We really wanted this pay study not to be the end of the conversation, but the beginning,” Mettler said. “We recognize these are not easy structures to fix overnight, they are complicated, and the problem is nuanced, and we felt it was our responsibility to not just point out the problems but help solve them.”
This story originally appeared in DCist.
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