Their boss would sooner name a dead man than any living woman.
November 16, 2015 8:08 AM   Subscribe

On Gawker's Problem with Women. A former staff writer describes how a media company founded on whistleblowing and radical transparency failed its female employees.
posted by emjaybee (41 comments total) 25 users marked this as a favorite
 
When I saw the tribute to Leah Beckmann on Gawker a few days ago, I immediately thought "Well, looks like Denton's done it again."

At one point I was advised by a male superior — a man I like and consider a friend, and who is both progressive and feminist — to not “dick-measure over salary” when I became aware of distinct difference in pay among writers with equivalent jobs.

What a jerk that guy is.
posted by infinitewindow at 8:54 AM on November 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


gawker...a media company founded on whistleblowing and radical transparency

haha what
posted by entropicamericana at 8:58 AM on November 16, 2015 [14 favorites]


I agree that article doesn't belong on gawker. It's navel gazing and reporting on oneself is problematic journalism at best. Leave this sort of thing to other institutions to report on or for an ombudsman report.

This said, I hate gawker with the heat of a thousand fiery suns. I've despised what they stand for, and what they have done to the internet in general, and journalism in particular, for so long that I can't honestly remember why I despise them as much as I do. The article mentioned in this one was salacious crap and shouldn't have ever made it online, but the idea that editorial isn't independent is also crap. Gawker is a shitsandwich and has always been so. The idea that it's not a diverse shitsandwich isn't surprising or difficult to wrap my head around. What is difficult to understand, for me, is why people want to work there or strive to fix it. Moving on is the best course of action and more women and more POC should take that option.

I created this site gawkerblawker.com (link to the projects page) and I can honestly say my life has been way better without gawker and gawker angst. I get an email or two every month thanking me for that site. I should probably update the directions.
posted by cjorgensen at 8:58 AM on November 16, 2015 [14 favorites]


there’s the hiring of A.J. Daulerio to work at a gambling site despite not knowing anything about gambling

Some examples of Daulerio's previous work.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 9:08 AM on November 16, 2015


This said, I hate gawker with the heat of a thousand fiery suns.

Seconded. Some years ago, they actually ran a bad photo of my husband with a story about how unattractive he was. That was actually the point of the story, pretty much. So yeah, I have an axe to grind, but really, fuck those motherfuckers really hard because they suck in every way.
posted by holborne at 9:15 AM on November 16, 2015 [9 favorites]


Back in the early days of mefi, Liz Spiers, Choire, and Nick Denton would be at mefi meetups sometimes. They seemed like OK people personally, but the site itself just seemed like an pseudointellectual version of the National Enquirer or something.
posted by jonmc at 9:17 AM on November 16, 2015 [6 favorites]


What a jerk that guy is.

it's not and never "that [one] guy." in the same paragraph, before and after your quote:

The union effort prompted my discovery of an egregious pay discrepancy, which I brought up with male writers and editors to their either mild interest or argumentative dismissal...As Joanne Lipman wrote in the New York Times in August, “[Men are] absolutely certain that they don’t have a gender problem themselves; it must be some other guys who do. Yet they’re leaders of companies that pay men more than women for the same jobs.” The debate over pay, worth, and skill kept spiraling until I found a new job and left the company.
posted by twist my arm at 9:44 AM on November 16, 2015 [27 favorites]


I still love Liz Spiers.
posted by josher71 at 9:52 AM on November 16, 2015


Jezebel founder Anna Holmes gave me her perspective on the way she feels women are treated at Gawker Media:

“My feeling — now more than ever — is that Nick [Denton] has women in two sorts of positions at the company. The few women who actually wield power are, by and large, incredibly competent and dedicated and are expected to clean up other people’s messes and act as emotional caretakers and moral compasses. The women who are not in power, well, it sometimes felt to me like the company saw them as circus acts; provocative and good for pageviews but ultimately very disposable.”

She continued:

“This isn’t to say that some men at Gawker Media haven’t been considered disposable. But what IS notable is that men in positions of power are not expected or required to be as thoughtful and responsible as their female counterparts — many are in fact REWARDED and admired for their recklessness and immaturity, a recklessness and immaturity, that, as you know, has gotten the company in heaps of trouble over the past couple of years.”
posted by twist my arm at 9:52 AM on November 16, 2015 [18 favorites]


there’s the hiring of A.J. Daulerio to work at a gambling site despite not knowing anything about gambling

Oh, hello there. I thought everyone had forgotten about Oddjack.

If you google my username here and Oddjack together it'll link back to evidence of my roughly eight glorious months ten years ago working for AJ delivering content for the gambling blog.

The link offered by Ralston McTodd is intended to draw a circle around AJ with a big arrow pointing to him as an awful person. And, you know, when he's not doing legit investigative journalist stuff, that's pretty much the tone and content of what he used to write when I was collaborating with him. Probably still writes that way. He also had no idea what he was doing with a gambling blog (not that anyone could have done heaps better with the concept) and got me to agree to subcontract through him for a far lesser rate than I got paid a few months later when Gawker management put me on contract directly. The blog became (well, maybe always was) increasingly focused on personality-based attacks, usually against pseudo-celeb poker players, and I was encouraged (and all too happy) to get caught up in that.

Those are the awful things I can say about AJ Daulerio.

That being said, working with AJ improved my writing a great deal. I haven't blogged in about seven or eight years, but when I left Oddjack my ability to find focus and humor in what I was writing had been honed to a much sharper state.

I'm absolutely certain I said offensive things during my time on that blog, and sincerely hope I've grown as a human being since. And even with the negatives I mentioned about working for AJ, his editorial support and guidance that helped me find a sharper voice left me with something that I hope transcended some of the muck in which I'd been wallowing. He and I never became friends (and only met once in-person), but I definitely don't think of him only for his miles-wide asshole streak. He also helped me as a writer once, and I'm glad for that.
posted by GamblingBlues at 9:56 AM on November 16, 2015 [5 favorites]


I agree that article doesn't belong on gawker. It's navel gazing and reporting on oneself is problematic journalism at best.

Must be nice to be able to dismiss earnest, well-researched reportage about a specific employer's obvious and long-standing problems with maintaining a non-hostile workplace for its dwindling base of female employees as navel-gazing.
"[Men are] absolutely certain that they don't have a gender problem themselves; it must be some other guys who do. Yet they're leaders of companies that pay men more than women for the same jobs."
Therein lies the most foundational documentation of the existence of #notallmen. Individual men desperately (albeit understandably) want to see themselves as less sexist than they actually are, so whenever a woman talks about sexism in front of them, the reaction of many -- most, but #notall! -- men usually involves an unironic utterance of "hey, I'm not sexist"/"you know I'm not sexist, right?" followed by the not-so-timid extension of a hand awaiting the delivery of a Special Ally Cookie.
When women perform invisible labor, they often keep their grievances invisible, too.
Yes, and yet when we do air our grievances, we are quickly reminded that these grievances constitute:
Nagging
Whining
Self-victimization
Rank oversensitivity
Making mountains from molehills
The wholesale invention of problems where none actually exist ("No one wants to be straightforward about sexism in their industries because hey, what if it really is in our heads?")
The shunning of the noble cause of rationality and clinical analysis in favor of the contemptible, inextricably female-coded foible of emotional expressiveness
A lack of proper "feminine" behavior
Hysteria

It's just another facet of the unwinnable dichotomy that forms the basis of female socialization.
posted by divined by radio at 9:57 AM on November 16, 2015 [106 favorites]


Moving on is the best course of action and more women and more POC should take that option.

this is never how you fix things for women and PoC and only works when you have the privilege of options. diversity is an issue even in not shitsandwich places so maybe take your shitsandwich criticism into a thread specifically about shitsandwiches rather than going into a thread about feminism and trying to make it about shitsandwich.
posted by twist my arm at 10:03 AM on November 16, 2015 [37 favorites]


I would LOVE to give up, or block The Entire Gawker Family of Blogs and get on with my life, but I really do like io9 and Lifehacker.

Not to derail, but can folks point me to some non-gawker equivalents that have the breadth and scope of those two blogs?
posted by Major Matt Mason Dixon at 10:42 AM on November 16, 2015 [1 favorite]


The link offered by Ralston McTodd is intended to draw a circle around AJ with a big arrow pointing to him as an awful person.

Not really, although I guess I should have offered more context? I just find it funny that I remember him from the early 2000's as this guy asking people about "Lorraine Bracco's vagina hole" and then I lost track of him and he somehow became a Serious Journalist, as well as Denton's pick for "the most successful editor of Gawker.com." And I kind of wonder how a similarly "bold, infuriating, unpredictable" woman would fare.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 10:44 AM on November 16, 2015 [4 favorites]


This is a fantastic article. It addresses so well the nuances of the role and treatment of women in so many workplaces (not just media) - thanks for posting.

Lots to unpack here, I'll highlight a couple of things:

It's navel gazing and reporting on oneself is problematic journalism at best. Leave this sort of thing to other institutions to report on or for an ombudsman report.


I understand the sentiment behind this, but I think it kind of speaks to the problem that the article touches on a little with this:

In August 2014, Jezebel published “We Have a Rape Gif Problem and Gawker Media Won’t Do Anything About It.” I remember when it appeared because I thought it was exciting to work at a company where people were directly questioning authority on their own site — rather than waiting for another outlet to pick up the story — while also recognizing how fucked up it was that they’d had to resort to this. “In refusing to address the problem,” the post read, “Gawker’s leadership is prioritizing theoretical anonymous tipsters over a very real and immediate threat to the mental health of Jezebel’s staff and readers.” When I spoke to several Jezebel staff writers about their decision to publish it, the same narratives came up over and over.

“It took me four years to build up a callus where I didn’t care anymore and I was able to not read how much people hated me. That was so awful psychologically. It’s way worse for women and it’s way worse when you’re writing about women’s issues and it’s way worse when you’re forced to look at graphic images of sexual assault,” former Jezebel features editor Tracie Morrissey told me about the rape gifs that were littering Jezebel’s comment section. “No one did anything about the rape gif issue until we wrote a public story and called them out for it.”


The problem being, that issues that affect women are routinely overlooked, especially if it somehow negatively implicates the leadership (i.e. men) who should have seen it and done something about it but didn't.

At Gawker, as in much of the media, women are frequently managing editors or deputy editors, the kinds of jobs that require corralling stables of neurotic writers into successfully running a daily publication. This task can be thankless no matter where a woman works, but especially so at a place like Gawker, where bylines are associated with traffic and traffic is associated with success.

This is the glass cliff, which is something that it would be good for anyone who is interested in helping women in the workplace to become acquainted with.

But as Anna Holmes wrote in The New York Times Magazine at the beginning of November, the idea of “diversity” at many companies is more and more just that: a hollow idea. “Bragging about hiring a few people of color, or women, seems to come from the same interpretive bias, where a small amount is enough.” In order to foster a diverse company or industry, generous support and integration (for lack of a better word) must be a continual commitment in growing talent.

My own sneaking suspicion is that companies that look more diverse than average may actually be worse places to work for women or POC. Because I think that some places may hire certain people to tick all the boxes of diversity that they need and then think they've done what they need to and not really do much more. So then the POC or women who were hired are left to wither away in mid-level positions while men get promoted all around them; or they are continually not taken seriously, undermined or any of the other lovely little microaggressions that we hear about all of the time (if we take the time to listen). But hey, the company is 50% women! And [high number]% of them are managers! Forget that these women may not have a place at any sort of real decision-making table or that they're routinely excluded from the behind-closed-door unofficial guy talks on which any number of things are hashed out or more or less decided.

But what IS notable is that men in positions of power are not expected or required to be as thoughtful and responsible as their female counterparts — many are in fact REWARDED and admired for their recklessness and immaturity, a recklessness and immaturity, that, as you know, has gotten the company in heaps of trouble over the past couple of years.”

This. Absolutely this. It's worth stressing again and again. I've had multiple male managers where if I acted like they act, I have no doubt I would have been fired. No doubt at all. And what's funny is how everyone still insists women are the emotional ones! L....O....L!!

It's not about just hiring more women (BASIC, but still so many places can't even do this), and it's not just hiring more women to higher level positions (although this is important too), it's hiring more women into positions of power and then not setting them up for failure from the outset. By either putting them in charge of things that are higher-risk or more difficult to begin with or by treating them as shrill, bossy, hysterical or bitches when they do their job. Because once a woman gets pushed into the viewpoint of being difficult or hard to work with, then she's pretty much kind of fucked no matter what she does.

It's funny how out of everything I care about, every issue that I have an opinion on - there is not one - not even one - on which I get pretty much complete agreement across the board on from other women than the issues of how women are treated in the workplace. I have friends who are the polar opposite of me politically, friends who are the polar opposite of me demographically, friends who don't pay attention to or care about politics at all; but if I talk to them about the sexism that women face in the workplace I get emphatic agreement across the board. I mean everyone. And we're just talking about women tired of being undermined, talked over, passed over, mansplained to, humiliated, not taken seriously. These are just the basics. We're not even talking about some of the more nuanced stuff that this article goes into. Stuff like the glass cliff and the invisible labor, and the vast majority of men who believe in gender equality but who are so unwilling to even consider their own culpability in the system. It's just depressing.
posted by triggerfinger at 11:09 AM on November 16, 2015 [38 favorites]


At Gawker, as in much of the media, women are frequently managing editors or deputy editors, the kinds of jobs that require corralling stables of neurotic writers into successfully running a daily publication. This task can be thankless no matter where a woman works, but especially so at a place like Gawker, where bylines are associated with traffic and traffic is associated with success.

You can look at many editorial jobs thusly: Are you responsible for "editorial strategy" and execution of the aforementioned strategy or are you responsible for making sure the proverbial trains run on time?

The distinction is important because one class of jobs is associated with "leadership," "vision" and upper management. Go on, guess which one.
posted by sobell at 11:25 AM on November 16, 2015 [3 favorites]


Must be nice to be able to dismiss earnest, well-researched reportage about a specific employer's obvious and long-standing problems with maintaining a non-hostile workplace for its dwindling base of female employees as navel-gazing.

That's not at all what I did. I would suggest you reread what I wrote if that's what you think I did.

I said I agreed with the decision that this content did not belong on gawker. Period. I made no judgements on the reporting itself. There's a reason you see limited reporting of the Wall Street Journal on the Wall Street Journal. Generally, even when a newspaper is the news they rely on other papers to do the reporting. News sites that report on themselves quickly become ouroboros. Leave it to other institutions to do this reporting or an ombudsman.
posted by cjorgensen at 11:44 AM on November 16, 2015 [2 favorites]


it's not and never "that [one] guy."

Good point, twist my arm.
posted by infinitewindow at 11:50 AM on November 16, 2015


News sites that report on themselves quickly become ouroboros. Leave it to other institutions to do this reporting or an ombudsman.

This complaint would be much more relevant if Gawker hadn't been publishing stories about itself and its staffers for years (most recently during their Condé Nast CFO fiasco). What pushes this one over the edge from "SOP for this publication" to "navel-gazing"?

For a publication that supposedly prides itself on embodying "radical transparency," with a history "of the editorial staff using the sites to write about what goes on here in an open and honest way," it seems sketchy at absolute best that this one topic would just so happen to be the place where the executive editor felt the need to draw the "done with Gawker writing about Gawker" line in the sand, and even sketchier in light of the rest of the rest of his email informing the author that he was killing the piece.
posted by divined by radio at 12:13 PM on November 16, 2015 [6 favorites]


sketchier in light of the rest of the rest of his email informing the author that he was killing the piece.

Can you expand on this?
posted by josher71 at 12:25 PM on November 16, 2015


the rest of his email informing the author that he was killing the piece.

Is this the same John Cook? I've had an icky feeling about him after reading his piece about his role in an underground junior high publication that engaged in sexualized bullying of female classmates. I've known guys like this, and they usually "grow up", as it sounds like he did, but that doesn't necessarily mean viewing women as full equals. I guess this latest doesn't shock me.
posted by Ralston McTodd at 12:57 PM on November 16, 2015


Can you expand on this?

For one, Cook apparently believes he puts Evans' objection that "there is no direct upward motion for an aggressive woman at Gawker" to rest by repeatedly making an example of the one woman who has found the most success there -- the only woman in their governing editorial body -- without addressing the "aggressive" part (or the possibility that Lacey Donohue's success, whether she's considered "aggressive" or not, may not be readily duplicable). He also leaves huge swaths of her piece completely unmentioned -- most glaringly, the pay disparities -- in favor of spending paragraphs picking apart the individual examples against which he thinks he has the most reasonable lines of defense.

To that end, his closing with "I take your point and don't deny this dynamic. But it doesn't do a very good job of describing the three posts that got the most traffic and attention since I started working as executive editor" is like "hey, I'm not sexist" liberal dude cookie-seeking 101. The whole email is like a vaguely professional version of "but I know a woman, and she says she's never experienced sexism," and overall par for the course when it comes to missives written by whiny men who simply don't want to acknowledge just how much they've personally contributed to replicating the gender gap in salaries, bylines, boardrooms, and beyond.
posted by divined by radio at 12:58 PM on November 16, 2015 [8 favorites]


I'm surprised there was nothing about Fleshbot, especially since it had a female founder (Lux Alptraum). I get that one piece can't cover anything, but I do wonder how women are treated at Gawker's site about porn. I'm guessing not fantastically, but I'd just be guessing.
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 2:02 PM on November 16, 2015


(I know Fleshbot was sold in 2012, but it's still part of Gawker's history.)
posted by Lentrohamsanin at 2:05 PM on November 16, 2015


What pushes this one over the edge from "SOP for this publication" to "navel-gazing"?

Nothing? I'm not going to defend gawker. I'm perfectly fine believing navel-gazing is SOP for this publication. It was icky and masturbatory before. This article would have been icky and masturbatory had it appeared onsite. I'll have the same criticism next time they write about themselves.
posted by cjorgensen at 5:59 PM on November 16, 2015


Gawker to Retool as Politics Site
posted by Etrigan at 12:33 PM on November 17, 2015


And layoffs.
posted by zabuni at 12:47 PM on November 17, 2015 [2 favorites]


Today we are folding Gawker’s The Vane, Jezebel’s Millihelen and Kitchenette, Lifehacker’s Workshop and AfterHours, Jalopnik’s Flight Club, and Gizmodo’s Indefinitely Wild and Throb. Pursuant to Gawker’s new focus, Defamer, Morning After, and Valleywag will be permanently shuttered, clearing the path for Jezebel to become the primary voice for celebrity and pop culture coverage in the network.

Jezebel will be hiring an editor to launch a new health, beauty, and self-care subsite.

And oh hey, all the "celebrity and pop culture coverage" gets sentenced to the pink ghetto, while the men can go do the important work.
posted by zabuni at 1:09 PM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


Aw, fuck, Millihelen was Jane Marie's site.
posted by rewil at 1:17 PM on November 17, 2015


I09 might be among the fallen. Sooooo what have we learned? Feel like this whole episode should teach us something, but--what?
posted by Potomac Avenue at 2:40 PM on November 17, 2015


Dammit! Where will I get my Behind Closed Ovens now?
posted by infinitewindow at 3:38 PM on November 17, 2015 [4 favorites]


From the sounds of that memo, Gawker's rebranding itself to turn into the site that Racket Magazine was gonna become but never had the chance to be. That sounds amazing.
posted by rorgy at 3:55 PM on November 17, 2015


As a commenter from the "And layoffs." link notes:
"So ... Gawker is becoming Wonkette. And Jezebel is beoming ... Gawker?"

Add to that, Gizmodo is becoming io9...something something rearranging deck chairs on the titanic?
posted by juv3nal at 6:02 PM on November 17, 2015 [1 favorite]



Add to that, Gizmodo is becoming io9...something something rearranging deck chairs on the titanic?

Is there any evidence they are financially bad off?
posted by josher71 at 7:28 PM on November 17, 2015


I am so goddamned enraged that Jezebel, which I don't even like but which was the Internet's most recognizable feminist blog, is now a fucking celebrity gossip site. It's like if women read stories about unjust sexism, they'll get dangerous ideas, like about how they should get equal pay or equal consideration for investigative opportunities, or maybe they'll post something about their former jobs on Medium. Let's make sure women who used to visit Jezebel for feminist content get stuck arguing over whether JLaw's lipstick was too dark at the Hunger Games premiere in East Fuckistan or whatever instead.

And oh my god, John Cook's letter explaining that he was killing the story. I actually agree that Gawker needed to stop writing about and getting high off the fumes of its own implosion, but this section:

You write that at “Gawker, where byline is associated with traffic and traffic is associated with success, the invisible labor in editorial management roles (the kind that actually enable growth) is often put to women who are frequently forgotten or replaced or moved around.” I take your point and don’t deny this dynamic. But it doesn’t do a very good job of describing the three posts that got the most traffic and attention since I started working as executive editor. Diana Moskovitz’s Greg Hardy scoops, bearing her name (because they are HERs) were edited and supported by Tim Marchman, Barry Petchesky, Puja Patel, and Kyle Wagner. Who is invisible there, and who is the star? etc., etc., more examples of exceptions.

No one, because men aren't invisible by default; that's the whole point, you twat.
posted by Yoko Ono's Advice Column at 7:49 PM on November 17, 2015 [5 favorites]


Is there any evidence they are financially bad off?

Not immediately (so far as I know), but there is the Damocles sword of the Hulk Hogan lawsuit possibly going against them.
posted by juv3nal at 8:08 PM on November 17, 2015


Sooooo what have we learned? Feel like this whole episode should teach us something, but—what?

To me the lesson is corporate media is broken. I still think the future of journalism is online, but unfortunately no one really values it, since no one wants to pay for it. With the impending ad-wars it's only going to get worse for revenue. When you are pursuing year over year growth over all else people become disposable and it's too easy make cuts.

Is there any evidence they are financially bad off?

Supposedly they had a good year last year, and an OK year this year, but as Yoko mentions they may take a bath in a lawsuit.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:23 AM on November 18, 2015




josher71 I was just flabbergasted that she would say that they anticipate losing, but that the damages will be so low it won't be a big deal. It seems to me, that type of statement is just begging the court to impose punitive damages. It seems like an enormous tactical error.
posted by goneill at 8:15 AM on November 18, 2015


Dammit! Where will I get my Behind Closed Ovens now?

Good news! The series will continue over at Wonkette!
posted by LizBoBiz at 12:44 PM on November 23, 2015 [2 favorites]


Freddie deBoer in the New York Observer: Why Women Need Affirmative Action Now
To be clear, the modern workplace is still grimy with old-fashioned sexism and harassment. But as we attempt to improve upon the limited progress we’ve made in the workplace, addressing the kind of implicit biases and inequalities that Ms. Evans discusses will be essential.

The question is: Why have these conditions persisted, even at a company filled with progressives, and in a New York media scene that should be one of the most feminist workplace contexts imaginable? As in so many other things, I suspect that the reason is a lack of structural thinking in addressing the problem. In so many contexts, racial and gender inequalities are still discussed in individual, emotional, and social terms, rather than in material and structural terms, and the result has been a failure to recognize both the depth of the problem and potential solutions. Testimonials like that written by Ms. Evans are an important part of recognizing the structural nature of institutionalized sexism.
posted by Rustic Etruscan at 5:38 AM on December 4, 2015


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