New York Times Union Accuses Management of Perpetuating Racial Disparities
The New York Times Guild, a union representing approximately 1,300 workers at the Times, has released a report alleging that the paper discriminates against non-white employees in performance evaluations.
According to a guild analysis of 2021 data, “being Hispanic reduced the odds of receiving a high performance evaluation score by 61 percent, being Black reduced the odds by 47 percent, and being Asian reduced them by 34 percent.”
In 2020, the difference in evaluations was even more stark; zero black Times employees received the highest possible rating. White employees, on the other hand, accounted for 90 percent of those who did receive it. “The disparities were statistically significant in every year for which the company provided data,” per the guild.
The union alleges that the Times has persistently refused to acknowledge any statistically significant disparity between the evaluations for white and non-white employees, and has employed a mathematically indefensible method — a binomial test — for detecting bias.
“This is what statisticians use when they are dealing with separate, unrelated categories or yes/no questions. For example, they might use it to determine whether Black employees are more or less likely than white employees to be hired to the Business desk, or whether Hispanic employees are more likely to work in the Washington bureau,” explained the guild in its report, before asserting that “it is a wholly inappropriate approach when dealing with an ordinal variable like performance ratings, where the results are clearly related and one rating is better than another.”
“In fact, the company’s method frequently failed to find statistically significant racial disparity even on a series of dummy datasets in which we intentionally inserted significant bias,” continued the guild report. In one test of the Times’s method performed by the guild, “Black employees were 20 times as likely to get the bottom rating, and yet the company’s methodology failed to find statistically significant bias.”
A spokesman for the Times told National Review that “having an equitable performance evaluation system is one of the most important levers we have to ensure we are developing and supporting the growth of our people in a fair manner. We’re committed to a performance evaluation system that is fair and equitable, and we have been working to continuously improve it.”
“The NewsGuild raised a similar issue last year about our ratings and we undertook our own expert analysis which gave us confidence that our ratings were not applied in a discriminatory way. The NewsGuild has recently shared highlights of a new study, which we are in the process of reviewing,” said the spokesman, who also touted a “multi-year action plan to make the company a great place to work for everyone.”
“We want all employees to succeed and thrive at The New York Times—a place we are proud to work and want it to be the best it can be,” wrote the guild in a tweet before calling on the paper “to rethink its bargaining position of seeking unilateral control over performance reviews, and work with us to find solutions.”
The findings come after a series of high-profile dust ups at the Times driven by racial and generational tensions between staffers.
Veteran science reporter Donald McNeil Jr. was ousted from the paper in February 2021 for using the word “n***er” while chaperoning a group of high-school students on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. According to McNeil’s account of the incident, he used the term when asked by a trip attendee whether he believed a student who used the same word on social media should have been suspended from school.
McNeil was initially disciplined for the incident in 2019 after a student complained, but ultimately resigned under pressure two years later after a group of 150 Times employees signed a letter calling for a “renewed investigation.”
The paper come under fire more recently after former Times opinion editor Bari Weiss revealed that an op-ed on police reform submitted by Senator Tim Scott (R., S.C.) was spiked after a senior editor impugned the African American lawmaker’s motivations, asking a fellow editor who was advocating for publishing the op-ed whether he believed “Republicans really care about minority rights?” The same editor also told his more junior colleague to “check with” Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer’s office before running the op-ed.
