One of the left’s favorite wedge issues is their claim that women make less than men, and President Joe Biden has repeatedly railed about the evils of this “pay gap.” But a review of his White House payroll finds that Biden is just as guilty of this supposed sexism as anyone else.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal took a look at Joe Biden’s White House payroll, and what it found made a mockery of Biden’s claimed “progressive” values by finding that the executive office has a gender pay gap of 20 percent among his White House staffers.
For the Journal, author Mark Perry, an American Enterprise Institute scholar, found that women working in the Biden White House make 80 cents for every dollar that his male staffers earn. So much for equal pay.
“The median man on Mr. Biden’s staff earns $105,000, while the median woman gets only $84,000,” the Journal’s editorial board wrote.
It noted, though, that there is a legitimate reason why women are paid less on average than the men in Joe Biden’s employ — called the “composition effect.”
“Among 269 female and 179 male White House staff in Mr. Perry’s spreadsheet, there are more women in lower-paid roles such as staff assistant,” the Journal noted. So, the fact is, more women have come in at entry level positions than men, and most of the men have more experience and higher standing. So, naturally the men will be getting paid more.
But these are exactly the sort of facts that progressives usually completely ignore when they rail about the supposed “pay gap” in America today.
Indeed, a June article on the White House’s own website, the Council of Economic Advisers said that “among all wage and salary workers usually working full-time, a woman made just 83 cents for every dollar paid to a man.”
The Journal scoffed about this, though, and blasted Biden for his hypocrisy.
“Wait, if Mr. Biden pays only 80 cents on the dollar, does that mean his White House is three percentage points more structurally sexist than the labor market writ large? We’d love to hear his reply to that one, since Mr. Biden’s rhetoric about ‘equity’ leaves no room for nuance,” the outlet wrote.
The Journal added that liberals love to take a 1-to-1 approach without adjusting for education, job experience, or market forces. And then they use those flawed statistics to claim that women make less because of “sexism” in society. That same article by the White House Council of Economic Advisers, for instance, said that “women with post-secondary degrees face a larger penalty than the overall pay gap.”
But the Journal has a rejoinder to that proclamation.
“The range in graduate education is massive, from a master’s in social work, to a medical or law degree, to a Ph.D in bioengineering. Lumping all these people together and then cutting the data set by gender is not a way to understand what’s truly going on in the world,” the Journal wrote.
“If it were,” the paper said in a jab at both feminists and Joe Biden, “feminists should be running Mr. Biden out of town on a rail.”
But Biden is given credit for his stern words about the pay gap, nonetheless.
Fox News pointed out that during a March event at the White House to mark “national equal pay day,” Biden said he was “working to change” the wage gap.
“I call upon all Americans to recognize the full value of women’s skills and their significant contributions to the labor force, acknowledge the injustice of wage inequality and join efforts to achieve equal pay,” Biden said.
In another instance, in a March 14 tweet, Biden claimed, “Women lose thousands of dollars each year, and hundreds of thousands over a lifetime, because of gender and racial wage gaps. I’m committed to building an economy where my daughters have the same rights and opportunities as my sons.”
Charlotte, I couldn’t agree more.
Women lose thousands of dollars each year, and hundreds of thousands over a lifetime, because of gender and racial wage gaps.
I’m committed to building an economy where my daughters have the same rights and opportunities as my sons. pic.twitter.com/0vholYMTaR
— President Biden (@POTUS) March 14, 2023
Despite all that jawing, all his efforts didn’t go to ending the pay gap in his own offices.
Perry has reviewed this pay gap of White House salaries among the staff of several past presidents. And in 2016 he found that Barack Obama — another self-proclaimed progressive president — also had a pay gap. At the time, Obama was paying his female staffers almost 11 percent less than his male staffers.
The researcher pointed out in that article that Obama’s female staffers had to work an additional 30 days into the next year to earn the same salary as the typical male staffer earned in a current year.
Granted, Perry found that Trump also had a pay gap, but Trump wasn’t running around claiming to be a champion of strict equal pay.
The point is, these Democrats swoop into office making their usual progressive proclamations about championing equal pay for women but never seem to make any real effort to “correct” this evil sin in their own offices. It’s all just so typical of Democrat hypocrisy.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.
