Executive Bitch Slapping

Now that patriotism is a burka for all sorts of sins, it's hard to recall that, back before we fought to free women from the Taliban, bitch slapping was a major motif in American pop culture. The most popular performers spewed sexual hate, to the acclaim of critics who saw all sorts of progressive values in their screeds. Remember how the arbiters of hip assured us that backlash culture gave men a chance to butch up and women a chance to play girly with no implications for real life? Now comes evidence that, while we reveled in forbidden games, a corporate equivalent of the cultural backlash was taking shape in the highest echelons.

A report released last month by the General Accounting Office, under the talented prodding of representatives Carolyn Maloney and John Dingell, reveals that the wage gap between male and female managers has actually been growing wider. The survey studied the 10 industries that employ over 70 percent of women in the workforce. It used Census Bureau data collected between 1995 and 2000, at the height of the Clinton boom. It found that, in publicly funded professions such as education and health services, the management wage gap narrowed somewhat, but in industries less subject to government regulation, it broadened. The most dramatic reversals for women occurred in communications and entertainment, the very industries where the cultural backlash was manufactured and marketed. In communications, where female executives earned 86 cents for every dollar grossed by males in 1995, they earned 73 cents five years later. In entertainment, the gap went from 83 to only 62 cents on the dollar.

No one knows why this growing disparity exists. Business groups blame it on the fact that many women leave their jobs to have children, sacrificing seniority. But that's a constant occurrence, so it shouldn't account for the expanding gap. The most tangible explanation lies in the distinctive nature of the recent boom. "We didn't spread the wealth," notes demographer Martha Farnsworth Riche, a former director of the Census Bureau. "We grew the disparity."

This may explain why the wage gap for non-management workers has narrowed even as it widened at the top. The big bonuses and stock options didn't go to working men. Instead, as Riche notes, "The huge money went to the top 1 percent." And when you look at the proportion of women who hold these "clout positions," the numbers are truly shocking.

A 2001 study by the Annenberg Public Policy Center found that women have only 3 percent of the top jobs in communications. They make up only 1 percent of top executives in entertainment and media companies. At the AOL/Time Warner combine, the percentage of top female execs is . . . zero. So where do women work in these corporations? Mostly in marketing, human resources, and public relations. Here, women make up nearly half the management staff. But in the boardroom, a very different ratio applies. According to the Annenberg study, there's only one female board member at AOL/Time Warner; at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., there are none. At major e-companies, the figures are not much better. Yahoo leads the pack with eight women out of 18 top executives, while Amazon has none. Consider that the next time you shop online.

As for print companies, little is known about their salary practices. The Census Bureau data used in the GAO report didn't include print media; nor has the industry produced a survey of its own. The American Society of Newspaper Editors reports that women represent 35 percent of newsroom supervisors, but it has no information on female managers' wages. Why should it, when so few media watchdogs keep track of such things? No major press critic saw fit to cover the GAO report (except for conservative Betsy Hart, who roundly criticized it). "Everyone sends things to me," says Howard Kurtz of The Washington Post, "but I didn't hear anything about this." Apparently he wasn't aware of the page-two story about the report in his own paper. But you can't blame Kurtz. The story got a lot of play on women's cable channels like Oxygen as well as CNN (which has a surprisingly high number of female news executives), but it never made the networks' national news.