Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) on Thursday mentioned former New York Times executive editor Jill Abramson when discussing pay equity legislation on the Senate floor.
Abramson was fired from the Times on Wednesday, spurring reports that she was dismissed after she approached management about earning less then her male predecessor, Bill Keller.
“It should not be lost that Republican senators are continuing their agenda by just saying no. Whether it’s something as logical and as important as pay equity, so that a woman doing the same job as a man gets the same amount of money,” Reid said on Thursday.
“Look what happens, it appears, in the New York Times. The woman that ran that newspaper was fired yesterday. Why? It’s now in the press because she complained she was doing the same work as men in two different jobs and made a lot less money than they did. That’s why we needed that legislation,” he continued.
In a memo to staff on Thursday, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said his decision to replace Abramson had nothing to do with compensation, but was because of management reasons in the newsroom.
“Compensation played no part whatsoever in my decision that Jill could not remain as executive editor. Nor did any discussion about compensation,” he wrote. “The reason – the only reason – for that decision was concerns I had about some aspects of Jill’s management of our newsroom, which I had previously made clear to her, both face-to-face and in my annual assessment.”