“As women start to lean in, men have to lean out if we’re going to end up in the same place.”
On Wednesday, May 21, Gloria Steinem — journalist and women’s rights icon — said that Jill Abramson’s firing from the New York Times is a double standard.
Steinem spoke out about what she’s calling sexism on Robin Morgan’s weekly radio show, Women’s Media Center Live with Robin Morgan. Other women featured on the roundtable discussion were Carol Jenkins, WMC founding president, Emmy awardee, and former WNBC New York news anchor; Geneva Overholser, former member of the New York Times editorial board and former chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board; and Soraya Chemaly, writer, media critic, and activist.
After getting fired from the New York Times on Wednesday, May 14, Abramson has been at the center of conversations around equality and fairness between women and men in the media. On Saturday, May 17, New York Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. released a statement saying, “Equality is at the core of our beliefs at The Times. It will always be.”
But Steinem disagrees. Here’s what she said on the radio program:
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On double standards:
"It's obvious that it is a double standard, a huge huge double standard. I mean, we have all known editors of newspapers and especially the New York Times — I'm thinking of Abe Rosenthal who was so difficult, was legendary — so there is clearly a double standard. What the New York Times doesn't realize is that there is also a different kind of double standard in the sense that people expect better behavior from them. So they are going to and engender much, much, much more anger and outrage and disappointment than, say, a network or some other journalistic body might. And they're going to have to deal with this."
On the NYT's history of sexism:
"Also, I think backstage the New York Times has always been extraordinarily hypersensitive. When women as a group sued the New York Times for sex discrimination in the '70s, the Sulzberger of the era tried to get their lawyer fired from Columbia Law School for being their lawyer. It's not a problem of the woman who's being too critical, it's a problem of a newspaper that is absolutely incapable of taking criticism. So, this is both a typical case and a special case, also, special in the sense that, wherever power is greater, the discrimination against outgroups is the greatest."
On women and race:
"I think one of the questions we ought to ask right away is what salary is [Dean Baquet] getting? Is he getting an equal salary? In an ideal world, or of course if this were a straight-up competition situation, [Abramson and Baquet] would stand together, and that does occasionally happen. Derrick Bell quit Harvard Law School because there was no woman on the law faculty, I mean sometimes it is clear that this is a coalition. And mostly we are ... pitted against each other, but it is what it is now, and I think it's very important that we both point out the unfairness to her and demand fairness for him on salary and everything else."
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