...
4. By gender, the average salary for the 304 female White House employees is $94,047 compared to the $98,091 average for the 214 male staffers, which is a gender pay gap of 4.1% based on
average salaries. The White House is reporting slightly different figures of a $93,752 average salary for women and $94,639 for men, a gender pay gap of only 1%, and is taking credit for “narrowing the gender pay gap” according to various media reports
here,
here and
here.
5. But there’s a big problem with the White House’s gender pay gap math that will most likely be ignored and not reported — it’s based on
average staff salaries by gender instead of the conventional, widely accepted comparison of
median earnings or salaries to calculate gender pay differentials. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics always compares
median earnings by gender and
reported recently that in 2019 “women who were full-time wage and salary workers had
median usual weekly earnings that were 82 percent of those of male full-time wage and salary workers.” From the Census Bureau’s
most recent report on the gender pay gap, “The female-to-male earnings ratio compares the
median earnings of women working full-time, year-round to the
median earnings of men working full-time, year-round. The 2019 female-to-male earnings ratio was 0.823, not statistically different from the 2018 ratio (0.816).” Likewise, the Census Bureau always reports
median household income and not
average household income.
...
But there might a good reason the White House departed from standard methodology and reported average and not median salaries because the
median salary of its 304 female staffers is $80,000 (half make more than $80,000 and half make less) compared to the
median male salary of $100,000 (half make more and half make less). Therefore, the typical female staffer in the Biden-Harris White House currently earns only
80 cents for every $1 a male staffer earns, and there is a
20% gender pay gap at the Biden White House. That pay gap is more than two times greater than the average gender pay gap for the Washington, DC labor market of 9.3% according to the most recent data available from the
Department of Labor (see Table 3) for 2019. If the White House had been consistent and used the same standard pay gap methodology that it and everybody normally use including government agencies like the BLS and Census, it would have to report that “Women working full-time at the Biden-Harris White House are typically paid just 80 cents for every dollar paid to men.”
