The ostensible guardians of “facts” at Snopes are upset with us and others who pointed out the hypocrisy of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s massive male-female pay gap. As you may remember:

Elizabeth Warren’s Female Staffers Made 71% of Male Staffers’ Salaries in 2016 The gender pay gap in Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D., Mass.) is nearly 10 percent wider than the national average, meaning women in the Massachusetts Democrat’s office will have to wait longer than most women across the country to recognize Equal Pay Day. . . Women working for Warren were paid just 71 cents for every dollar paid to men during the 2016 fiscal year, according to a Washington Free Beaconanalysis. The median annual earnings for women staffers, $52,750, was more than $20,000 less than the median annual earnings for men, $73,750, according to the analysis of publicly available Senate data. When calculated using average salaries rather than median, the pay gap expands to just over $26,051, or about 31 percent.

So here’s what Snopes has to say about Thin (Pay Envelope for Women) Lizzy:

The analysis excluded relevant data and failed to include criteria necessary to prove the claim that women on Senator Warren’s staff were paid less than their male counterparts for equivalent work. . . Fairly comparing pay rates between men and women who work in Senator Warren’s office is therefore a challenge because not many of her staffers hold the same job titles, and even among those who do, pay discrepancies between men and women are not obvious when education and experience are factored in.

But that is not the claim of the critics: it merely uses the aggregate pay gap in the same simplistic way that feminists have been using for decades. And economically literate critics, like Christina Hoff Sommers and Diana Furchgott-Roth have been pointing out all along that once job classifications are taken account of, the pay gap largely disappears. Where was Snopes when the Obama White House (which also had an embarrassing male-female pay chasm) was trotting out the superficial figure? Why does it take the embarrassment of Thin Lizzy to bring out the fact-checkers? And will feminists stop using that simplistic superficial figure? Don’t hold your breath.