• Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in 2010. Photo: Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini / Associated Press / AGOEV
Photo: Evan Agostini / Evan Agostini / Associated Press
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in 2010.
Former New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson in 2010.
Nine months after she was fired from her job as executive editor of the New York Times, people can’t seem to stop talking about Jill Abramson. On Tuesday, women will be able to hear from the editor herself when she joins a list of high-profile women addressing a networking conference in the Bay Area.
More than 5,000 women are expected at Silicon Valley’s first-ever “Lead On” conference, which will also feature Hillary Rodham Clinton and designer Diane Von Furstenburg. The event in Santa Clara is one of several women-networking events scheduled in the Bay Area over the next few weeks.
Abramson and veteran media entrepreneur Steven Brill are raising money to begin a journalism venture that would advance writers as much as $100,000 to write very long investigative stories.
Abramson chatted with Chronicle Editor in Chief Audrey Cooper in advance of the Santa Clara conference, covering topics such as pay inequality, Silicon Valley’s openly misogynistic culture, the crisis in the Middle East and whether female managers are held to different standards than men.
Gender issues at work
Cooper: I’m curious as to whether you think that all the attention your career changes have attracted over the last few months — whether you think too much or too little attention has been paid to whether you were fired because of your gender.
Abramson: I guess I’d answer the question a little bit differently, in that all of the attention to my exit from the Times … I worry that my 17 years of really excellent journalism there is somewhat overshadowed by that level of attention to just the end.
Cooper: Do you think there would be more emphasis on your career at the Times if you were a man?
Abramson: I don’t know. I mean, I feel like I got in real time during my career a lot of favorable attention for the quality of the work and for doing a good job. That’s just a hard question to answer. I’m just not sure. I think the fact that I was the first woman to become executive editor and that I then got fired, that that combination obviously had a lot to do with why there was so much (media) attention.
Cooper: What do you want to say to women at Tuesday’s conference? What are you trying to get across?
Abramson: It’s meaningful to me to be coming to talk in Silicon Valley because there has been so much attention in the past year to the challenges women (face in) trying to get to the top and get venture capital funding and be involved in startups and attract investment. … I understand there are special challenges, but it’s really important to keep pushing and to be resilient. I’ve done quite a bit of talking about the necessity for women, over the arc of a career, to realize there will be both triumphs and setbacks. You have to roll with the setbacks and not let them defeat you, and try to make sure that you are treated fairly and paid fairly.
Cooper: Let’s talk about pay equality specifically. You have said that you think your demand for a comparable salary had something to do with the tension at the Times between you and the publisher. But if you think ultimately that played some part in why you were fired from the Times, what is a woman to do if she thinks she’s being paid unfairly?
Abramson: I wish that I had been at the front end when I was named executive editor, that I had been both more inquisitive and more attentive to the issue at that time and that I hadn’t waited to the point where I was two years into the job to bring that issue to the attention of the people who I worked for. If I had advice for a young woman at a point where she was being promoted, I think it’s important to ask what the person who had the job before you was being paid, and at that point where you have leverage, to make sure that you’re being paid what your predecessor made. If your predecessor was a male, make sure you’re being paid either on a par or, if you’re stepping into a bigger job even, that you’re getting more pay.
Job performance
Cooper: You’ve also said that women should not over-think how they come across. You’ve called it “authenticity” ...
Abramson: Authenticity, I think, is important …
Cooper: But there’s also an argument to be made that sometimes knowing your audience — knowing whether or not people are going to respond to a pushy person regardless of their gender — is just as important.
Abramson: Right. Well, it isn’t that my advice is to be pushy. My advice is not to let an inferior voice that’s full of worry about how you’re coming across: “Am I being too assertive or not assertive enough?” That can tie you up in knots in an unproductive way. It’s very important at the same time to be, as you said, sensitive to your audience, to listen to other people. But I’m talking about something else, which is a kind of nagging, insecure voice that I know some women have running in their head all the time when they’re at work. That can be destructive.
Cooper: Do you think that women who make it to the top of their professions have a disproportionate responsibility to promote and hire other women?
Abramson: I absolutely do, absolutely I do. Obviously you don’t hire and promote women just because they’re women. You are looking for people who are exceptional and highly qualified. But in male-dominated professions — and many newsrooms in America are still that — it’s very important to promote more women and to promote more diversity in the newsroom. Was it Madeleine Albright — I’m going to mangle this — who said there’s a special place in hell reserved for women who got to the top and didn’t try to promote and bring along other women? I certainly agree with that.
Cooper: I had dinner recently with an editor of a very large, national magazine, and she said to me that she gets tired of hearing about not enough women in media. Her point was that, ultimately, she didn’t believe that women with families work as hard as men.
Abramson: Oh, I just completely disagree with that, just from my own experience managing any talented women who had families and worked their heads off during my career. That’s a long stretch of time. And I just completely disagree with that.
Gender in politics and Silicon Valley
Cooper: I also read that Anita Hill wrote you a note, I think, to say that she was proud of you in the last few months.
Abramson: I had dinner with her recently, which was great.
Cooper: I bet a lot of people would have liked to be a fly on the wall of that restaurant. It got me thinking: Do you think that Clarence Thomas would be confirmed today if his hearings were held in 2015?
Abramson: With the makeup of the Senate right now, I would bet yes. The hearings that we lived through in 1991 wouldn’t have been quite the spectacle that they were then, with the all-male Senate Judiciary Committee and the senators seeming to know nothing about the issue of sexual harassment. But I think that it’s possible that the confirmation vote would be definitely in his favor and perhaps by a wider margin.
Cooper: I think a lot about whether being a woman and a news editor influences my decisions. One area The Chronicle has focused on is the so-called “bro-culture” and misonogystic culture of Silicon Valley. I don’t know whether you’ve gotten a chance to experience this firsthand yet ...
Abramson: The issue that fascinates me right now is the issue of VC firms not wanting to invest in women-headed companies, and I think I’d put that at the front of the line of things that really need to change.
Cooper: There are a lot of people who would say that’s because the companies invest in people they know. It’s a cycle that doesn’t stop.
Abramson: Right, or it isn’t only people you know, but it’s sort of people you feel comfortable with or people who inspire your confidence. I think that culture will change. It has to change because women are great at making businesses successful, and to not invest in that potential seems perverse to me.
Journalism’s future
Cooper: So you’ve talked about beginning your own startup.
Abramson: We’re trying to get financing. That’s been interesting.
Cooper: The news of it blew up my Facebook feed because of the idea of giving a journalist a $100,000 advance for a story. 
Abramson: The important thing is the survival of quality journalism, and I think people want to read extraordinarily well-worded, elegantly told, gripping stories that explore important areas of life and the world. The appetite for that is very robust, and we’re going to be publishing stories of between 20,000 and 30,000 words. That’s almost the equivalent in the nonfiction world of a novella or short book. I was surprised when people had the reaction that, “Oh my God, that’s so much money” (for an advance). Since when did we decide that writers should be paid nothing? I mean, that’s what surprised me. And you know, if I spent my life worrying about what the navel-gazers are going to say, I wouldn’t be accomplishing anything, so I don’t. I developed the hide of a rhinoceros.
Cooper: I like that. You don’t read your own press.
Abramson: I didn’t when I was fired. For me, it’s just a sanity tool.
Cooper: I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about what you’ve said is one of your biggest regrets at the Times, and that is the paper’s reporting on whether or not Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. What do you think about the role that the Times — and you as the editor — played in where we find ourselves now in the Middle East?
Abramson: I’m not sure it is a clear line between then and now. The Times has been candid about saying, and I have been as well, that some of the reporting — not all of it, but some of the reporting in the lead-up to the Iraq War — lacked sufficient skepticism, was faulty and relied on government intelligence that was clearly wrong. That’s an extremely regrettable chapter in our recent history.
Cooper: OK, just one last question. When I was 16, my high school guidance counselor told me that I had to learn how to golf because without that, I would not be invited to the boys club in any meaningful way. Do you think that’s true for women still, that you have to be invited to the boys club?
Abramson: No. The idea of there being this uber boys club has started to erode. Although I must say, I’m a mean miniature golfer.
Audrey Cooper is the Editor in Chief of the San Francisco Chronicle. E-mail: acooper@sfchronicle.com. Twitter: @audreycoopersf.
The Lead on Watermark Silicon Valley Conference for Women begins Tueday morning in Santa Clara. A waiting list exists for tickets. For more informaiton, go to www.leadonca.org.