5
FALLING FROM THE TOP
Rising with Resilience
“A woman is like a tea bag—you never know how strong she is until she gets in hot water.”
—ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
IT’S MAY 14, 2015, EXACTLY a year to the day since sixty-one-year-old Jill Abramson, The New York Times’s first and only female executive editor, was very publicly fired from the top editorial post at the most prestigious newspaper in the nation. Two and a half years into her job, she was kicked to the curb so unceremoniously that her ouster made headlines around the world. It was the first time in the paper’s 160-year history that a woman sat at the top of the masthead. So when Jill was fired, allegedly for her “brusque management style,” the media went wild. Some reported that Jill was “difficult,” which for a female executive is a word loaded with gender double standards. It was also reported that Jill had hired a lawyer before she was fired to look into compensation issues, believing that she was not paid the equivalent to her male predecessor.1
Coincidentally, on the first anniversary of Jill’s dethroning, I heard her speak at the Women’s Power Habits conference in New York City, run by Rachel Sklar and Glynnis MacNichol’s TheLi.st. (As mentioned in chapter 4, TheLi.st is a network and media platform devoted to empowering women.) Jill’s one-on-one conversation with Rachel Sklar was fittingly named “Be the Disrupter, Not the Dinosaur.”
Jill’s session followed “Starting from the Bottom,” an inspiring talk with Kathryn Minshew, the devastatingly smart twenty-nine-year-old CEO and cofounder of The Muse. Kathryn announced that she just closed a funding deal of $10 million for her job search-meets-career-advice start-up. Together with her cofounder, Alex Cavoulacos, Kathryn had taken The Muse from a scrappy jobs website for Millennials to a serious employment platform and online career resource that they are expanding into every major metro area in the country. The women in the audience exploded in applause.
“After listening to Kathryn and her impressive business, I thought maybe our talk should be called ‘Falling from the Top,’” Jill says with a laugh. “One of the basic truths for just about everybody in the working world is that usually you will hit a roadblock and get fired from a job, and there’s no reason not to call it what it is.”
As a prominent journalist, Jill felt strongly that she wasn’t going to sugarcoat her firing. She would own it. “I devoted my life to telling the truth through reporting, I was not going to try to put lipstick on it,” Jill says.
NO SURRENDER: GET UP AND GO AFTER IT
Even with the tabloid media hounding Jill after she was fired, she didn’t let herself feel shamed or collapse into a puddle about what was next. “I wasn’t really prepared for the amount of attention that this got. The New York Post followed me when I was walking my dog,” Jill says. “I tried to be good-natured and polite to all of these people. It mattered to me to try to set an example. Paralyzed with fear was not an option because this was public. I had accepted an invitation to be a commencement speaker at Wake Forest University. The person who arranged it had called me and said, ‘I’m sure you will withdraw.’ And I said, ‘There’s no way I’m going to withdraw. It was very important to me to show resilience to somehow convey my excitement about the future and the fact that I wasn’t completely knocked off course.’”
The morning after Jill was fired, she went to a session with her trainer who handed her a pair of boxing gloves. She had never boxed before, but hitting the bag was intensely satisfying. Jill asked her trainer to take a picture of her with the gloves and she emailed it to her kids who were worried about her. “I wanted to show them that mom is in fighting form,” Jill says.
Her daughter, Cornelia, posted the photo on Instagram and it went viral. The next day it was the cover of The New York Post. While she never intended anyone to see the photo except for her kids, Jill’s message “get up and go after it” was something she was proud for the world to see. She wasn’t defeated. She wouldn’t disappear. Still fiercely passionate about her work, Jill would move forward. That meant returning to her love of writing, reporting, and teaching. Jill is now a political correspondent for The Guardian, and she’s writing a book about how digital is transforming the newsroom. She is also teaching journalism classes at her alma mater, Harvard University.
“Cold calling people and trying to convince them to let me in and trust me as a reporter was scary because I hadn’t done it in a while,” Jill says. “I thought my way of doing it had probably somehow gone out of style as the journalistic firmament and the whole world of news is changing so dynamically and rapidly.”
Speaking to a roomful of women, Jill admitted that going solo can be tough and scary and was not something that she was used to. “Sometimes it’s lonely being out on your own,” Jill says. “Sometimes I can feel like I am falling off the planet and maybe no one notices. I’ve been in newsrooms my whole life surrounded by other journalists. I miss that.”
Writing a New Chapter: Harvard Yard and Daycare Drop-offs
Nearly a year after hearing Jill at the conference, we meet in her office in the basement of the Barker Center at Harvard. This is Jill’s second year of teaching an intro to journalism seminar. The first thing that strikes you about Jill is her distinctive voice. It’s an unusual voice that’s been judged and dissected, even analyzed by scientists as to its origins. The New Yorker’s Ken Auletta described it as a nasal car honk, an odd combination of upper and working class. When we meet, Jill is dressed in a simple black dress and cardigan sweater and is excited to be going to a party later that evening honoring novelist Toni Morrison, who has been guest lecturing at Harvard.
The night before, Jill was up half a dozen times with her six-month-old granddaughter, Eloise. During the week, Jill now lives with her daughter, Cornelia, thirty-three, and son-in-law Robert, thirty-two, in Boston. They are both surgical residents at Massachusetts General Hospital, with grueling work schedules. On the weekends, Jill goes home to Madison, Connecticut, where her husband Henry has recently been appointed the town historian. They also have a loft apartment in New York’s Tribeca, but these days it’s rarely used.
After getting fired, Jill made a conscious decision that while she would continue working, she wanted to control her own schedule and spend more time with her family, which now means helping care for Eloise. Aside from night duty, Jill will eventually do the drop-offs and pick-ups from daycare. “I want to do what I can to enable my daughter, who has such extreme work-life balance, to be the surgeon she wants to be,” Jill says.
Getting Heard
The first year after losing her job was a year of reflection. Jill felt depressed. She ruminated. She dug deep. And she did what she warns other women never to do: “I rewound the movie and tried to examine where did I go wrong, what didn’t I see in real time?”
But some of this replaying of the film in her mind, Jill says, was valuable. It unearthed the roots of her communication style, a style that she feels can be profoundly misunderstood. “I realized that for a lot of my career I felt unheard, which I think is a familiar thing to women,” Jill says. “Often, I would make a point in a meeting, it would be ignored, and the boss would say, ‘as Jerry said.’ I think I talked too much and didn’t listen enough, and that directness was interpreted as being intimidating. So I’ve tried to be more careful about both of those things.”
What Jill describes, the feeling of being blown off in a meeting of mostly men or, worse, having your brilliant idea attributed to the guy at the table rather than you isn’t only a remnant of old-school newsrooms. It’s still a common phenomenon in classrooms, conference rooms, and even the White House. When President Obama took office in 2008, nearly two-thirds of his senior staff were men. The female staffers had a tough time not only being invited to important meetings, but also being acknowledged once they were there. So the women developed a genius strategy that they called “amplification.” When one of the women at the meeting made a point, other women would repeat it and give credit back to the original contributor. “We just started doing it and made a purpose of doing it. It was an everyday thing,” said one former Obama aide who requested anonymity to speak frankly to The Washington Post, which first reported on this story. It worked and President Obama started noticing and calling on more women in meetings.2
Survivor
Resilience and grit are inherent to Jill. In a quite literal sense, she is a survivor. On May 7, 2007, as she was crossing the street on her way to the gym, Jill was run over by a delivery truck in New York. The truck crushed her right foot. The rear tire ran over her left side, breaking her femur and pelvis and leaving her with severe internal injuries. A titanium rod was inserted into her leg, and she endured months of painful rehabilitation and recovery, moving from a wheelchair to crutches to a cane before recovering. Years later, she even wrote a piece in The New York Times about the traumatic experience and its residual effects. The piece was published less than two weeks before she was fired.3 Perhaps losing a job is all about perspective. After having been run over by a truck, you define your life differently.
Jill was devastated when she was fired, but she didn’t panic. She took a walk through Central Park and had dinner with her family that night. She knew she didn’t have to be “Jill Abramson from The New York Times” to survive. She was a survivor already.
During 2016, as a political columnist for The Guardian, Jill covered the presidential campaign, focusing on Hillary Clinton’s second bid for the White House. Jill first met the Clintons in 1978 when she was working as a freelance writer at a political consulting firm in South Carolina and Bill Clinton was running for governor of Arkansas. She has reported on both Clintons for decades. It’s not simply being of a similar age and professional status that makes Jill feel a kinship toward Hillary—it’s also that unwinnable double bind where a woman’s leadership style, vocal tone, and likability are scrutinized and questioned that connects them.
“Personal qualities are much more commented on when you are a woman in power than a man,” Jill says. “I identify with that. It also has occurred to me that some of these things, which have not changed in my lifetime in the workplace, may change with a woman president.”
Get on with Your Knitting
Jill scored a series of firsts in female leadership roles after joining The New York Times in 1997. She served as the first female Washington Bureau Chief, the first female Managing Editor, and the first female Executive Editor. Ironically, Jill discovered that it was losing her job at the top of the Times’s masthead that suddenly made her a visible role model for women, particularly younger women. The press frenzy that swirled around her firing, and climaxed at her memorable Wake Forest commencement address days after being fired, showcased Jill as a fierce woman who flexed her grit with grace and balanced it with humor. In her speech, Jill spoke about the importance of continuing to work—to always grow and create. She invoked the commencement speech Robert Frost gave to Colby College in 1956.
“He described life after graduating as a piece of knitting to go on with. What he meant is that life is always unfinished business, like the bits of knitting women used to carry around with them, to be picked up in different intervals,” Jill told the 2014 Wake Forest graduates. “So today you gorgeous, brilliant people, get on with your knitting.”4
Most people probably won’t fall as far in their careers as Jill Abramson did when getting fired as executive editor of the Times, but her commencement message was clear: Never give up on yourself or your life’s work.
“I really believe in that Robert Frost poem. You’ve got to pick yourself up, and if you have had a good career until that point, launch something off of that. Life would be boring if it was just one arc of success. People do show what they are made of when something bad happens to them, like getting fired,” Jill says. “I think in some ways my having been fired has been a much more powerful message, especially to younger women, than being the executive editor of the Times. I get stopped on the street by younger women who say, ‘Thank you for what you did, I admire you so much.’ And I don’t think they are talking about just having been the Executive Editor, and that’s very meaningful to me,” Jill says.
Personal Ink Tells a Story
When Jill got fired, much was made about what she would do with the “T” (for the Times) tattoo she recently had inked onto the middle of her back by a tattoo artist in the East Village. Jill assured everyone that the tattoo wasn’t going anywhere. It’s emblazoned into her skin as much as it’s burned into her identity—and by the way, it’s not the only tattoo Jill has. At fifty years old, when Jill was promoted from Washington Bureau Chief to Managing Editor, she moved back to New York City and marked the milestone by getting a tattoo of a New York subway token. She wanted something quintessentially New York, and because she loved the subway and didn’t want an apple tat, she got the token. A decade later, on the cusp of turning sixty, Jill got the now famous “T” for the Times and “H” for Harvard stacked on top of each other on her back. She also got a tattoo of a South Carolina palmetto tree, an ode to her time post-college when she and her husband lived in South Carolina and worked for progressive political candidates.
“I think of them as my personal hieroglyphics, and they all relate to something in my life, like a passage,” Jill says, taking off her sweater and showing me the art on her back. “It was just a passion that seized me out of nowhere. No one in my family particularly approved. My husband was like if you really want to get one, go ahead.”
Most sixty-year-old women are probably not getting inked. But most are not Jill Abramson. She wants to be thought of as a helluva reporter who was gutsy and inspired her colleagues to dig deeper than deep and be fearless about informing the public. Being a woman at the top of the masthead remains meaningful to Jill, and pulling women up with her has always been important. She actively sought to bring gender balance and diversity to the newsroom. She increased the number of female editors on the masthead to 50 percent. She wants to be known as a woman who helped other women achieve what they dreamed of achieving in journalism. And she wants others to know that she knows she’s not perfect.
“I’m not some kind of Joan of Arc, and I would like it to be known that I was open to the fact that I’ve made some mistakes too,” Jill says.
Jill thoroughly loves her time teaching and hopes to inspire the next generation of curious, brave, and extraordinary journalists. And it’s in this next chapter of her life that she feels like she’s continuing to make a difference. Jill thinks of her dad when she talks about dealing with getting through the tough times. “He was always proud of my accomplishments, but he was more proud of how my sister and I handled setbacks,” Jill says. “It’s during those times he would say, ‘That’s how you show what you’re made of.’”
It can be easy to say that Jill would land on firm ground. She’s been on Fortune’s Most Powerful Women list; she is one of the most seasoned and respected newspaper reporters and editors in America; she landed a million-dollar book deal, a teaching gig at Harvard, and a columnist position at The Guardian, where she’s covering politics. But she’s sixty-one years old in an era where forty-one can feel over the hill, particularly in the media industry.
“A career is a long arc, and it’s so easy to lose track of that. You’re under pounding pressure to carpe diem like several times in a week,” Jill says. “Keep your patience, because looking back on things, opportunity doesn’t knock just once. Sometimes you pass by a career opportunity because it isn’t right because of your family life or other reasons. Another opportunity will come along. Opportunity and time go together and are your friends; keep that in mind.”