It Turns Out There Is a Gender Pay Gap… At Gawker

A former staff writer for the embattled and toxic Gawker has lifted the lid on what we’ve all suspected: despite the company’s handwringing and editorial proselytising about “diversity,” it’s a cesspit of sexism and entrenched patriarchial favouritism.

Gawker, hypocritical? It’s tough to believe, I know. But Dayna Evans’s post makes for difficult reading… difficult because it’s hard to read the words through tears of joy and schadenfreude as she brutally dissects the overwhelmingly white and male management and editorial staff and then — shock, horror — reveals that there’s a difference in how much men and women are paid.

Of course, that last claim falls apart under scrutiny. Evans seems to concede, after ticking founder Nick Denton off for considering women “disposable,” that men and women file different kinds of stories: “I suggested that a personal essay is just as valuable as an investigative piece if both have the power to change the way people think about and reassess the culture we live in,” she writes.

Yeah, no. Sorry. This isn’t being paid differently for the same work; it’s being paid differently for different work, as any idiot reading can work out. That’s the thing about writing at the unbearable length these New York media types love to do: sooner or later your prolixity leads you to make accidental admissions.

Anyway, Evans’s post is a lot of fun, and you should read the whole thing because it’s packed full of delicious progressive self-flagellation and the sort of vicious, bitter infighting between unutterably terrible people that makes watching Gawker’s descent into madness and bankruptcy such utterly compulsive viewing. As one of Gawker’s many undeserving targets, I enjoyed it enormously.

By the way, to those imagining Nick Denton as an aloof New York socialite with no grasp of what ordinary people want to read, there’s another gem tucked away in this explosive set of disclosures: Evans reveals he doesn’t give a shit about sociopathic feminist hate-rag Jezebel, largely ignores the management of the whole vertical and doesn’t even read what they publish. Mirabile dictu.

Postscript: readers have responded jubilantly to the news, with far better jokes. Such rotters! 

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