Obama celebrates 50th anniversary of the 1963 Equal Pay Act while his White House pays women employees LESS than men



President Barack Obama marked the 50th anniversary of the Kennedy-era Equal Pay Act on Monday with an energetic celebration, but women in his administration continue to earn significantly less than men.

An analysis of his administration's 2012 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff shows that the median wage for female professionals in the Executive Office of the President was $9,000 less last year than for their male counterparts.

Congress passed the law in 1963. 'The day that the bill was signed into law,' Obama said, 'women earned 59 cents for every dollar a man earned on average. Today it’s about 77 cents.'

SCROLL DOWN FOR VIDEO

Turning his back on women? President Obama pays the typical female White House staffer $9,000 less than the typical male employee

The White House discloses the salaries of all its staffers to Congress once each year

'As I said in my inaugural address this year,' he added, 'our journey to equality is not complete until our wives, our mothers, our daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts.'

'I assume everybody thinks we can do better,' the president told a crowd gathered in the East Room of the White House, responding to his audience by returning to his famous campaign slogan, 'Yes we can.'



The Daily Caller reported in January that the median 2012 salary for female White House employees was $62,000. For men, it was $71,000.

That wage gap narrowed slightly from a $11,000 difference in 2011.



The White House did not respond to a request for comment about whether its gender pay gap opens up the president to fair criticism and complaints of hypocrisy.

His administration is not expected to disclose the White House staff's 2013 salary numbers until after the end of the year.

The White House fraternity? President Barack Obama's 2012 cabinet portrait included twice as many men as women

Obama's pay policies may less reflect bias than a lack of females in senior positions. The White House's disclosures paint a picture of a top echelon with a firmly planted glass ceiling.

Of the 20 White House staffers earning the top salary of $172,200 in 2012, just six were women.



And the president's cabinet, made up of 15 high-level officials, includes just three women.



A National Women's Law Center vice president praised Obama for moving in the right direction, but conceded that the glass ceiling hasn't exactly shattered since he took over at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

One group portrait on the White House website shows the president and vice president, the full cabinet, and other senior officials including the chief of staff, Council of Economic Advisers chairman, Environmental Protection Agency and Small Business Administration administrators, OMB director, UN ambassador and U.S. trade representative. That 2012 photograph depicts eight women and 16 men, before Secretary of State John Kerry took over for former Secretary Hillary Clinton.

Nationally, reports the liberal-leaning National Women's Law Center, women earn on average just 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Obama cited that number Monday morning, as he did in 2012 and 2011 -- and several other times going back to his 2008 national campaign.

'To anyone who says 77 cents on the dollar sounds pretty close to equal,' Obama said, 'I say, "your math is bad."'



Fatima Goss Graves, the NWLC's vice president of education and employment, told MailOnline that the latest Department of Labor numbers date from the end of 2011, suggesting that Obama's first three years in office are reflected in the overall stagnation of women's wages.

Asked if the president should begin a national move toward wage equity with his own staff, Graves said, 'I'd love to see that.' But she also gave him credit for issuing an executive order directing the Office of Personnel Management 'to find out what causes that [gender] wage gap and come up with a plan to do something about it within 6 months.'



Obama noted that development on Monday, reminding his audience that he 'signed a presidential memorandum directing the federal government to close that gap for good for its employees.'

'We have to set an example,' he said.



Window dressing: White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett armed up the crowd in the East Room of the White House for Barack Obama. Jarrett is among the president's most trusted advisers, but relatively few women have followed her into his administration's highest echelon of power

Obama has cited the same statistics about America's gender pay gap since he first ran for president, and the numbers didn't shift at all during the first three years of his presidency

The overall median White House salary, according to the Los Angeles Times, was $65,667 last year. In all, the administration's report listed 468 em­ploy­ees with a com­bined pay of $37.8 mil­lion. Most work on the White House staff, although the list also included the staffs of the Office of Policy Development, including the Domestic Policy Council and the National Economic Council.

President Obama himself earns a $400,000 salary. He returned 5 per cent of that, or $20,000, to the federal treasury in April, in a symbolic show of solidarity with government workers who were furloughed as a consequence of mandatory budget cuts related to the sequester, a budget-battle solution he first suggested in 2011.