Women Can’t Have Nice Things, the media wants us to know. It would be simply illegitimate for an accomplished woman to make the kind of money her male peers take for granted—and if she runs for president, expect the media to make sure we all know how badly that accomplished woman screwed up by attaching value to her labor. That’s the message from The Washington Post’s article on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s decades of legal consulting while she was a law professor.
“Sen. Elizabeth Warren earned nearly $2 million consulting for corporations and financial firms, records show,” the headline reads. Not mentioned in that headline or until the sixth paragraph of the article is the fact that this nearly $2 million came over three decades. Even if you accept the Post’s angry qualification that “nearly all of the money was made from cases filed after she got her job at Harvard in 1995,” the attempt here to create a scandal is ridiculous if you consider the kind of money top law professors can and do make as consultants. Or the kind of money that graduates of Harvard Law School are very often paid in their first year out of school, for that matter. (It’s $190,000 a year, plus bonus. For someone who just graduated. In 1999, it was $100,000, plus bonus.)
”Every lawyer who looks at the Warren disclosures understands that she made a small fraction of the money she could have made if money were her priority, given her standing in the law. Any story that doesn't include that is misleading readers as to what's going on,” tweeted civil rights lawyer Sasha Samberg-Champion.
Warren was of course getting a salary from Harvard, but it’s a guarantee that many of her colleagues were making at least as much on outside consulting. So basically we’re to be outraged by a woman at the very top of her profession making somewhat less money than her male peers. How f’ing dare she? So uppity.
Warren released the compensation data herself as she calls for Mayor Pete Buttigieg to release even just the names of the companies he consulted for during his time at McKinsey and to open his high-dollar fundraisers to the press.