Data from Michael Bloomberg’s media empire appears to debunk his claim during the Democratic presidential debate Wednesday night that women at his company “get paid exactly the same as men.”
“Let me tell you what I do at my company and my foundation and in city government when I was there,” Bloomberg said during the debate. “In my foundation, the person that runs it’s a woman, 70 percent of the people there are women. In my company, lots and lots of women have big responsibilities. They get paid exactly the same as men. And in my City Hall, the top person, my deputy mayor, was a woman, and 40 percent of our commissioners were women.”
According to The Daily Beast Thursday, unionized staffers at Bloomberg BNA conducted a pay survey last year of non-management employees that found that although 52.7 percent of BNA’s workforce comprised of women, female staffers earned 93 percent of the pay of their male counterparts. Bloomberg BNA’s union wrote in an April 2019 tweet that “women and people of color face the biggest gaps.”
Bloomberg BNA’s union also shared the study on Thursday in a tweet showing that white men earn almost $5,500 more than their female counterparts. The study showed more obvious differences among black and Latinx staffers.
HuffPost also reported on pay inequity within the Bloomberg media empire Thursday by citing a gender pay gap report filed by financial software giant Bloomberg LP in the United Kingdom in April 2018.
According to HuffPost, women employed by Bloomberg LP in the United Kingdom earn 21.9 percent less than men when it comes to median hourly wage. HuffPost also found that women make up only 20 percent of the top quarter of the highest-paying jobs and that the representation of women is most prominent in the bottom quarter of jobs.
In a statement shared with TPM Thursday, a Bloomberg LP spokesperson disputed HuffPost’s report, saying that it contains several inaccuracies that the company has highlighted to the reporter. The spokesperson told TPM that the inaccuracies include misreporting the UK gender pay disclosure data and confusing gender pay data with equal pay. The spokesperson added that unequal pay has been against the law in the UK since the Equal Pay Act was introduced in 1970 and in the US since the 1960s.
“Bloomberg LP pays employees equally for equal work. Bloomberg employees’ compensation is determined based on their job (function, role and responsibilities) and their performance, regardless of any classification,” the Bloomberg LP spokesperson told TPM in a statement Thursday. “We regularly review the compensation of our employees to ensure there is no unfair treatment in how they are paid and use tools to help managers make compensation decisions that reward performance.”
TPM also reached out to Bloomberg’s campaign for comment and we will update this post if we hear back.
Read The Daily Beast’s report here and HuffPost’s report here.
93% actually seems pretty close. How does the study account for who is actually filling what positions?
I suppose before anyone gets upset at the question, I should note that I’m not challenging that there’s a problem, but rather wondering whether it’s been properly characterized. Equal pay for equal work can be largely achieved while hiding an underlying problem of not hiring women as often for the higher paid work. You can have a situation where execs are being paid equally, secretaries are being paid equally, etc., but where hiring practices are not to hire equally for the higher paid positions. Sometimes that can be explained as occurring naturally to some extent (like if the demographics of the employees for certain positions somewhat match the demographics of who is applying for said positions), sometimes it can’t.
When a man lies to a woman about her worth, she doesn’t forget.
Nor should she.
It will never get better until equal pay for equal work is the status quo.
That is key and what is usually the biggest part of the problem (at least in my experience).
This ties into family leave and childcare, too. Both the presumption that women won’t be as available, and the actuality of things being structured so they’re not.
It’s more systemic than that.
According to Pew, 25pct of women said they were paid less than men performing the same job.
Transgender workers experience after the change. Those going from male to female see their earnings drop, while those who go from female to male see increases.
Also, when women successfully break into a previously male profession, earnings in that profession drop for everybody.