President Obama issued a declaration of “National Equal Pay Day” for Thursday, in a gesture aimed at highlighting what he described as a disparity between men and women in the workforce.

In a statement issued Monday, Mr. Obama decried a statistic showing women comprise roughly half of America’s workforce but earn an average 23 percent less than men, The Daily Caller reported.

“That disparity is even greater for African-American women and Latinas,” he said in the statement. “On National Equal Pay Day, we recognize this injustice by marking how far into the new year women have to work just to make what men did in the previous one.”

Deeper analysis has found that much of the pay disparity between men and women are due to factors other than bias. The Independent Women’s Forum, for instance, said the tenure and job description were often left out of the calculating process, and those two factors often explain the pay difference, The Daily Caller reported.

The Daily Caller also reported the seeming disparity between males and females who work within Mr. Obama’s own administration. In 2012, for example, an estimated 50 percent of White House staffers were female — but their median salary level was 13 percent less than the males, The Daily Caller said. And that’s an improvement over 2011, when that gap was 18 percent wide, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

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