In thelatest turn of events regarding the Sony hacking scandal, Fusion released an op-ed late Monday of ananonymous email containing a spreadsheet of Sony PicturesEntertainment’s 17 top executives and their salaries.
The spreadsheet, which hasn’t been confirmed by Sony, depicts a group of executives predominantly made up of white men. The company leaders have annual salaries starting at $1 million and topping out at $3 million, with minority members falling somewhere in between.
Theemail, which was reportedly sent to Fusion‘s Kevin Roose, contained a link to apublic Pastebin file that contained documents that led him to spendhours interpreting their contents. Roose draws the conclusionthat Sony has some serious diversity issues at the top of itshierarchy.
He explained in the article:
Thismorning, I received a link to a public Pastebin file containing thedocuments from an anonymous e-mailer, and have spent hours poringthrough some of them. I’ll spend more time in the days ahead. But oneinteresting tidbit caught my eye: a spreadsheet containing the salariesof more than 6,000 Sony Pictures employees, including the company’s topexecutive.
Normally,this wouldn’t be particularly enlightening information for anyone butindustry gossips and voyeurs. But when I sorted the list by “annualrate,” I noticed something notable: a stark homogeneity among the peopleearning the most. Based on the spreadsheet (and bear in mind that thesenumbers are unconfirmed – Sony Pictures didn’t respond immediately to arequest for comment), the employees of Sony Pictures with the highestannual rates appear to be nearly entirely white men.
The spreadsheet, pictured below, via Fusion, details annual salaries for Sony Pictures Entertainment’s top earners.
Of the 17 top-paid executives within this company, who make at least $1 million a year, 15 appear to be Caucasian. Ofthose 15 employees, Amy B. Pascal is the only woman. Of theremaining company big shots, Dwight R. Caines is African American, and Man Jit Singh is of Asiandecent, reports Fusion.
“Inother words, unless I’m missing something, the upper pay echelon ofSony Pictures is 94 percent male, and 88 percent white,” said Roose.
“SonyPictures isn’t alone in having a predominantly white, predominantlymale leadership, or paying its top executives multiples of what otheremployees make,” Roose said. “But the numbers leaked in the recent hack – assumingthey’re accurate – would mean that the top ranks of one major Hollywoodstudio are perhaps even less diverse than those of Silicon Valley tech companies and large Wall Street banks,” he concluded.
The information is released on the heels of yesterday’s announcement by The Hollywood Reporter that more data leaks were imminent.
The group suspected of being behind the hack, the Guardians of Peace, is now being investigated by the FBI, and is suspected by Sony to have ties to North Korea.
The hackers have also leaked some of Sony’s biggest new film releases online, including Brad Pitt’s Fury, and a reboot of the classic film Annie, both of which are being pirated and shared online through peer-to-peer websites.
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