Researching the statistics of White House salaries is VERY low on my to-Do list, ...
The topic remains very low on my To_Do list, particularly since — as Metaphor seems to realize — there are many reasons for a slight gender "bias" even if avoiding that is a goal. Does anyone really think Jennifer Psaki would be replaced with a man, if that were the way to bring male pay up to "parity" with female?
The reason I chose to look further was to make this a case study into right-wing bullshit from "think" tanks like AEI and how such bullshit can fool even obviously intelligent people like Metaphor.
I started by clicking one of OP's links to get a list of 560 W.H. employees and their salaries. Almost the first thing I noticed was that there were a very large number of employees with exactly $80K for salary, and a large number with exactly $100k, with few in between. This gave me a hunch what might be happening. Otherwise I might not have pursued further.
I also noticed that 41 employees had salary of $0 — more on that below. There were also some salaries that were clearly "low" — prestigious Jeffrey Zients and Eugene Sperling get only $36k? A serious researcher would diagnose that, but I'm just on a lark.
I clicked another link to see what AEI Senior Fellow Mark J. Perry had to say on the subject. By the way, gender discrimination is a topic dear to Perry. According to Wikipedia "He claims to have filed over 100 complaints at universities across the US against affirmative action programs and female only scholarships for “illegal sex discrimination”, referring to himself as “one-man mission” to fix the programs. In June 2016 Perry filed a complaint with the Michigan Department of Civil Rights seeking the closure of Michigan State University's Women's Lounge, alleging that having a private place for women to study on campus discriminated against men, and was a violation of civil rights."
Anyway, Perry's report starts with
1. There are currently 518 paid employees listed in this year’s White House salary report: 304 female staffers and 214 male staffers. As you can see from the salary report, the White House provides employee names, positions, and salaries, but does not provide data on employees’ gender. Based on the names provided, the gender for the majority of employees is obvious based on first names (e.g., Thomas, Matthew, Maureen, Stephanie) and for those names that aren’t obvious (Nelvis, Casey, Machmud, Kelsey, Vy, etc.) I conducted basic Internet research that included Google searches (including news and image searches), Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to determine gender.
He went to a lot of work (and guesswork) to determine gender! No mention of how he treated transsexuals?
560 employees reduced to 519 "paid" employees because 41 are shown with salary of $0. (How did Perry get from 519 to 518? I'll guess a clerical oversight by Mr. Perry given his busy schedule of perusing Twitter and Google Images to guess genders! Or more likely, supervising some AEI interns charged with this crucial research.)
The 41 unpaid employees include 28 males and 12 females (I'm guessing) so deleting them from the sample drove up male salary, whether median or mean, compared to female. (Does anyone doubt that Perry would have included them had that helped his argument?)
(Yes, 28+12 sum to only 40. I neglected to search Twitter or Google Images to guess the gender of Olatunde C. Johnson.)
I did go to the bother of guessing the gender of 519 paid employees. 252 seemed probably Female (F), 200 probably Male (M). and 67 Unknown (U). Comparing these subtotals with Perry's, we can assume that most of the U's were Female. For each of three groups (M, F and F+U) I computed the salary at various percentiles. ("Median" is synonymous with "50th percentile." @ Metaphor: Would you agree that showing several percentile salaries is more informative? Do you think Perry and AEI want to be "informative"?)
Code:
Percentile M F F+U
90% $155k $155k $155k
80% $130k $130k $130k
70% $110k $110k $110k
60% $104k $100k $100k
55% $100k $100k $100k
50% $100k $80k $80k
45% $80k $80k $80k
40% $80k $80k $80k
30% $77k $62k $62k
20% $62k $62k $62k
10% $58k $48k $48k
As you see, my "research" agrees with Perry's as to the 50%.
BUT if we had chosen any other reasonable percentile — 40%, 45%, 55%, 60% — the peculiar bulge that Perry and Metaphor are so fond of would disappear!
In the interest of intellectual honesty, I show the 10th and 30th percentiles also, even though they may support the Perry-Metaphor thesis. Raise your hand if you think a "scholar" like Professor Perry would have been so bold, were the effect reversed.
Speaking of "scholars," do TFT'ers think Perry observed that other percentiles (40, 45, 55, 60, etc.) argued against his position? And therefore suppressed this obvious and more complete analysis? I think it's almost as likely that this Professor lacked the cognition or statistical know-how to derive the statistic in the first place!
By the way, this post contains a slightly subtle test.
N Creel qrsraqre zvtug fnl:
"Fvapr gur zrqvna znl or n zrnfher cersreerq ol 'yvorenyf,' bayl vg znggref be fubhyq or choyvfurq."
Nalbar znxvat guvf pynvz vf rvgure irel hapbzsbegnoyr jvgu fgngvfgvpf be vf vagryyrpghnyyl qvfubarfg.
