Bloomberg Industry union: Women staffers are underpaid

Jason Albright, the unit chair for the union that represents journalists at Bloomberg Industry Group, sent out the following on Wednesday:

Dear Colleagues,

Today we mark Women’s Equal Pay Day 2021!

To underscore both the progress and the significant work remaining to be done in making pay equity a reality in our own workplace, we release the Guild’s 2021 Bloomberg Industry Group Pay Study.  It is attached to this email.

Among other things, our pay study found the following:

• Pay gaps exist for women, particularly women of color;

• There are pay disparities between older women and men;

• Pay gaps based on race exist among older workers;

• Younger men and women make roughly the same;

• The overall workforce is 65 percent White; and

• White employees make up a disproportionate number of the highest paying positions in the workforce.

A team of our members who have backgrounds in statistics and journalism, including members who have advanced degrees in data journalism, worked on the study. The members who conceived the report have a range of experience covering corporate pay structures, data analysis, and statistics. The analysis itself was conducted using R, a statistical computing software.

We have asked that INDG investigate the pay disparities we identify, take affirmative steps to promote more transparency regarding pay and workforce diversity, and make tangible changes to its hiring process to attract and retain a more diverse applicant pool.

The Guild will hold a Q&A session on our pay study later this month, and we will be circulating a unit-wide petition to push INDG to take measurable steps to remedy the problems we’ve identified.  Stay tuned for updates!

Yours sincerely,

Jason Albright
Unit Chair

A Bloomberg Industry representative provided the following statement:

There’s no doubt we have more work to do, but Bloomberg Industry Group is proud of the progress we’ve made to become more diverse, equitable, and inclusive.​

• When it comes to base salaries for our employees, we take into account a variety of relevant factors that have nothing to do with gender or race. These include position, experience, years of service and performance, as well as Guild-negotiated salary bands and seniority rules for our union members. Unfortunately, the Guild has published a pay study that fails to address all the factors that go into compensation at the company and ignores their own role in creating the compensation structure under the collective bargaining agreement.

• Taken at face value, the Guild’s latest pay study shows that its members under age 40 – almost half of the bargaining unit – are:
• Representative of the racial diversity in the U.S.
• Equitable in gender
• And suffer no pay disparities along race and gender lines
• Today, about 50% of our company employees, managers, and external hires are women. People of color represent almost 30% of our workforce, 22% of our managers, and almost 40% of our external hires over the past 12 months.

Bloomberg Industry Group remains firmly committed to diversity and inclusion and fostering an environment where many different experiences and world views are valued and appreciated.