Ginger Morrow writes for the Washington Free Beacon about an inconvenient set of facts for the Biden administration.
On the 2020 campaign trail, Joe Biden promised to close the gender pay gap in workplaces across the country, but in the second year of his presidency he has failed to close the gender gap on his own payroll, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis.
Female employees in the West Wing earn a median salary of $83,467, more than $16,000 less than the median salary of $100,000 for male employees, an analysis of a White House salary disclosure found. The 16.5 percent wage discrepancy tracks almost perfectly with the national gender pay gap, according to President Joe Biden’s own proclamation on Equal Pay Day in March, which stated that women across the nation make 17 cents less per dollar than men.
The White House released its annual salary disclosure this summer, which lists the names, titles, and annual salaries of all employees. The Washington Free Beacon surveyed the salaries of all White House employees on the disclosure, which lists 173 men and 235 women. Excluded from the analysis were detailees, who work at other agencies but are temporarily detailed to the White House.
The existence of a gender pay gap at the White House is indicative of the difficulty of closing the gap even for those who view it as an economic injustice. Economic experts say the gender pay gap in the United States is not the result of discrimination against women, but of other factors including the decision to have a family. Studies show that men and women with the same jobs and qualifications are paid equally.
“The next time you hear the Biden administration citing a national gender pay gap of 17 percent based on median earnings and using that difference to advance measures to achieve greater pay equity and address gender discrimination, it should be noted that Biden’s own White House has a similar pay gap of 16.5 percent,” said Mark Perry, a University of Michigan economist and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.