Blog Post

AEIdeas

An analysis of Senator Hillary Clinton’s official Senate expenditure reports by Washington Free Beacon reporter Brent Scher reveals that from 2002-2008, the New York Senator and champion of women’s rights, paid her female staffers significantly less on average than men working on her staff. In his article “Hillary Clinton’s War on Women,” Brent Scher reported that over the eight years that Sen. Clinton was in the Senate, the median annual salary for female staffers was about $40,800, which was 28% (and almost $16,000) less than the median salary paid to men of $56,500 (see chart above).

Senator Clinton’s 28% gender pay gap while in the Senate was more than double the 13.3% current gender pay gap in Obama’s White House and more than three times the average gender pay gap for the Washington, D.C. labor market of only 9.2%. As I pointed out in a post last week about “White House Equal Pay Day,” the glass ceiling in Obama’s White House means that women on his staff will have to work until this Friday, February 27 to earn the same income as men earned working last year. Women working for Obama should feel lucky only having to work until the end of February to achieve “Equal Pay Day.” The average female staffer working for Sen. Clinton had to work until the middle of May every year (almost 5 additional months) to earn the same income that their male peers earned working the 12 months of the previous year. In some individual years like 2006 and 2008 when Sen. Clinton’s gender pay gaps were even higher at 35% and 37%, Clinton’s female staffers would have had to work until about the end of June, an additional 6 months, to achieve “Equal Pay Day Working for Senator Clinton.”

As I pointed out in my post about Obama’s glass ceiling at the White House, Hillary Clinton can’t have it both ways, either: a) there are gender pay differences throughout the entire economy and in any organization including her Senate staff, which can be explained by factors other than gender discrimination including age, years of continuous work experience, level of education, number of hours worked, marital status, number of children, workplace environment and workplace safety, industry differences, etc., or b) any gender pay gap in aggregate, unadjusted salaries automatically exposes gender discrimination – including Sen. Clinton’s staff – and Clinton then needs to explain why she was “waging a war on her female Senate staffers” by paying them 28% less on average than men (and 3.5 times greater than the 9.2% average gender pay gap for Washington, D.C.).

So either: a) there was a glass ceiling for women working for Sen. Clinton and she herself is guilty of paying her female staffers significantly less than men by $16,000 per year on average, or b) Sen. Clinton is guilty of statistical fraud and deception for continuing to spread misinformation about the alleged discrimination-based gender pay gap at the national level with constant claims of women being paid “77 cents on average for every dollar paid to men” using only aggregate, unadjusted raw data.

Kudos and thanks to Brent Scher for exposing Sen. Hillary Clinton’s hypocrisy about the gender wage gap. If she responds, we can probably expect explanations involving “comparing apples to apples,” but that appropriate statistical standard is never, ever applied when Clinton and Obama engage in their typical statistical deception as they spread their false narratives about how women make “77 cents on the dollar to men” and that is “an embarrassment” (according to Obama) or means there is “more work to do” (see Hillary’s tweet below featured in Brent Scher’s article) or represents ongoing gender discrimination requiring executive orders and additional legislation, etc.