The Diversity vs. Salary Question

Inside a Met Director's Shocking Exit.) The worst cases of diversity-fixing have involved keeping everything the same, but strategically replacing a member of a museum's leadership team with a person or persons of color. No one can object. The optics are right, and in many cases those hires actually made and continue to make change. And one assumes they were hired at better than average salaries, although we know, that if the person of color in question is a woman, her salary is likely to be almost 30-percent less than her white male colleagues. The Pollyanna in us can say something is better than nothing. At least she's there. Small steps, blah, blah. Yes, but..... At the staff level, where men and women with newly-minted graduate degrees compete for a ridiculously small number of jobs, many with poor to pathetic salaries, things don't change. (Panera Bread pays its shift supervisors $11.48/hour and we're pretty sure they don't require an advanced degree.) And it's here that race and class come face to face with a job sector that expects a master's degree, maybe an internship or two, before offering a life-time of earning less than $50,000 annually. Why should a young woman of color invest in graduate school to then have to pay student loans while earning less than $15/hour with no benefits? Why should young women who want to combine parenthood with career, work for museums whose response to child bearing is "Use FMLA, and we'll hold your job for you" or worse, "Our staff is under 50 people, so we don't have to offer FMLA"? Yes, we've been a too-white, sometimes biased field for too long. But built into too many museum's workplace DNA is the idea that you are lucky to be there at all. This is the evil stepsister of Elizabeth Merritt's Sacrifice Measure. There, she defined a culture where predominantly white, well-educated wanna-be museum staff were willing to live with too many roommates, and skimp on their daily lattes in order to work in the rarified atmosphere of museums and cultural organizations. But how about the museums that exploit that desire? Who in action and deed tell emerging professionals you only need to sacrifice for a decade or more and then your median salary will be $48,000. Really? If you taught public school, worked in a public library, which also require a master's degree, your salary would be transparent and your national organization--the American Library Association or your teachers union might take a stand about what salary was appropriate for a masters degree holding person with some experience. We could be wrong, but we have trouble imagining a municipal library saying "We're non-profit, so we can't pay that much." You could envision the ladder you might climb, and it wouldn't involve hopping from part-time work, to a grant-funded position before finally reaching a full-time position. Don't get us wrong. We're not suggesting that other fields are nirvana, but until the museum field--from the top--AAM, AASLH, museum thought leaders and board members-- tackles this problem we will be a field easiest occupied by those with high-earning partners or trust funds. That does not make for a diverse workforce. Joan H. Baldwin