Media Has One Of The Worst Gender Wage Gaps Of Any Industry, Says Glassdoor Study

Unless you think all male journalists work 6.6 percent harder than their female colleagues, a new report on gender pay disparities offers a telling window into the supposedly left-of-center media industry. U.S. media ranks No. 5 in Glassdoor’s new study of the fields with the highest wage gap between men and women, ahead of fields like entertainment and finance.

American media companies — from TV networks, to newspapers, to digital media and book publishers — pay men 6.6 percent more on average, according to the research firm. It’s a business outranked only by healthcare, at the top of the list, followed by the insurance, mining and transportation industries.

Trailing media in pay inequality were fields such as retail, real estate, government, construction, manufacturing and education.

It’s a diversity issue once again rearing its head in an industry that has struggled to shake off the dominance of largely white and male bosses and workers. Not only are women more scarce in print, digital and broadcast media than their male colleagues, they earn less once they’re in.

An ongoing IBT investigation into diversity in digital media has shown that while digital media promises to lead the way to a more diverse, if not progressive, industry, ethnic and gender statistics at shops like Vox Media, Gawker Media and Politico lag behind or alongside legacy publications like the New York Times and USA Today.

Vox Media’s newsroom, which IBT reported is 80 percent white, is also 67 percent male, according to the company’s own internal numbers. (IBT reported in August that its newsroom is 75 percent white.) That same data noted that major progress has been made since 2013, when the entire company was 82 percent male.

BuzzFeed and Mic.com have better parity on both ethnic and gender lines, and Fusion remains a major outlier with a newsroom that’s majority-minority and majority female.

Glassdoor built the study from salary information culled from 505,000 full-time U.S. employees through the firm’s website.

Across all U.S. industries, men earn 24.1 percent higher pay than women do, reinforcing the widespread factoid showing that women earn about 76 cents to the dollar men earn.

The study notes that when comparing employees of “similar age, education and years of experience,” the gap narrows to 19.2 percent, and it shrinks to 5.4 percent when looking at employees of the same job title, employer and location. This is what’s known as the “adjusted” pay gap, and it’s how media ended up still in the top five.