“Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong, and in 2014, it’s an embarrassment.”
As has been commonly repeated, “There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics.”
This 23 cent disparity is a simplistic comparison of annual incomes from the 2010 Census. The number fails to account for the fact that women tend to work fewer hours over the course of a year, or often leave the workforce altogether, for childcare.
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis released a study in the last few years suggesting that the gender wage gap has been “declining significantly over the last 30 years” and that, in equal comparison, the wage disparity is most likely even smaller than assumed.
Further, the data itself is four years old. So the suggestion that the—albeit inaccurate—23 cent differential is an “embarrassment” predicated on the fact that it’s 2014 is impossible given that there is no census data since his second year in office.
But what makes this worse is that in Obama’s White House, his female staffers get paid only 87 percent of what his male staff gets paid. Physician heal thyself.
