Washington Post flack Erik Wemple, whose day job is writing a rarely-reported media blog, has really stepped in it now.
When the Washington-Baltimore News Guild this May released a study of WaPo race and gender pay disparities, Wemple simply regurgitated management’s claim attributing the humongous differences to non-discriminatory factors, primarily experience. But as the Newspaper Guild emailed members August 18, alluding to Wemple’s item quoting deputy managing editor Tracy Grant, the Post does not even track reporters’ overall experience, just their tenure at the paper.
So the whole WaPo rationale, which ironically mirror the standard conservative argument that statistical racial and gender imbalances are by no means evidence of bigotry, is based on “evidence” that does not exist.
But when Wemple quoted Grant he let her pretend the Post provided the Guild all of this crucial data — but they spiked it!
“I think it’s unwise to look at the simple average or even the median because it doesn’t take into account such factors as experience, which any rigorous analysis of the data would include and which is information which The Post provides to the Guild,” she told him May 23. “Furthermore the broad median figures don’t account for the nature of the positions. Without examining experience and role, it’s hard to draw any conclusions from these numbers.”
The union communique also trashes Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan for refusing to meet with them about the disparity. He delegated the matter to general counsel Jay Kennedy, who, the Guild suggests, is trying to intimidate pay gap critics into silence.
The email to Wemple and his fellow union members said:
Dear friends,
We’re sorry to report that Washington Post publisher Fred Ryan has shown a dismissive attitude to the Guild’s recent report on disparity in wages. Ryan has declined to meet with members of the Guild to discuss the report, directing instead that the Post’s labor lawyer, Jay Kennedy, handle the issue. Kennedy’s immediate response was to send a litigious-sounding list of demands.
We have been in communication since in an effort to obtain more information. The Post has now sent the Guild 2016 salary information, including the Guild raises that went into effect in June.
We are disappointed in the Post’s response. Unlike publishers at The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal/Dow Jones who acknowledged disparities and promised to take action to fix them,Ryan and other members of the Post’s management have focused their energy on the limits of the data and denied that any such disparity exists.
Deputy managing editor Tracy Grant’s reported comments in the news have focused on the data’s shortcomings, particularly in regard to its lack of data on experience. Wayne Connell, vice president of human resources, made a similar point at the June 8 town hall meeting: in response to questions about our report, Connell said he could “disprove” the Guild’s findings. He, too, focused on experience to explain differences in pay for the same work. He also cited performance ratings.
“What if one person brings 10 years of experience to that job, and the other person brings 10 days — should they be paid the same then?” Connell asked. “What if one person’s performance is clearly and obviously better and higher than another’s, should they be paid the same?”
If only it were that easy.
As we noted in our report on salary disparities, the data the Post gave us were outdated and incomplete. The most recent data had come from 2014 and contained no information on experience. The data contained information only on employees’ dates of hire – but as the Post well knows, date of hire is not the same as experience. A mid-career journalist with 15 years of work on her resume looks like a rookie in the data if she had been hired two years ago. That is why the Guild has asked the Post for more complete and timely data – and asked them to begin tracking experience with newly hired employees.
Since the release of our report, the Post has, in fact, confirmed that it has virtually no data to track experience, other than employee-submitted job application resumes. The Post also has, up to 2013, partial information on whether an employee has from 0 to 5 years of experience.
As for performance, we all know that performance evaluations involve a good deal of subjective assessment. In the past, we have seen evaluations manipulated to pressure some employees into taking buyouts, including several who were older and female. That is why the Guild, has been committed to obtaining data on performance evaluations to determine whether those are conducted in a fair and neutral way.
Going forward, we hope the Post management takes a more collaborative and less defensive approach to a longstanding problem that has also affected other companies.
In the meantime, we need to keep up the pressure on the Post, and we are asking for your help. As we approach Labor Day, please consider joining a task force on wage disparities to press this issue further.
Reached on the phone early Tuesday afternoon Wemple said about the union critique, “I’ll look into it. Thank you, Evan.”
When are you going to do that?
“Right away.”
Wemple received the communique five days ago and has written eight items since then — none with exclusive info. Just his usual hodge-podge of puerile attacks on Donald Trump and conservative media figures, plus attempts, like your average eighth grader, to show he’s smarter than everybody else.
But now he’s on it?
Kristine Corratti, the official WaPo communications director, did not respond to requests for comment.
But given that an older black man who worked for Corratti claims in a sworn affidavit for The Washington Post racial purge lawsuit that she deliberately forced him out, it is probably better she lets Wemple handle this issue.