War On Women: White House Pays Women 13% Less Than Men On Average

The Daily Caller has taken a look at the White House’s annual financial disclosure to Congress and ran the numbers on pay to male and female members of the administration. Their conclusion?

Well, it sort of looks like a war on women. At least as our friends on the left describe it.

The median 2012 salary for female employees of the White House was $62,000; for men that number was $71,000.

TheDC calculated the median male and female salaries by determining employee genders based on their names. In cases where the gender was not clear, TheDC either identified the specific employee in other ways or — in a few cases — assigned gender based on the most common use of a given name according to databases of baby names.

The 2012 pay disparity represented an improvement from the disparity in 2011 figures the Washington Free Beacon reported last year. According to that analysis, the median female compensation in the White House was $60,000 — $2,000 less than in 2012 — and the male employees’ median was unchanged at $71,000. That amounted to an 18 percent difference.

In his statement last year declaring April 17 Equal Pay Day, Obama lamented the pay disparity between men and women in America, echoing the well-worn yet often-questioned statistic that “women who worked full-time earned only 77 percent of what their male counterparts did.”

“There may be many reasons for this disparity — choice of responsibilities, family considerations may play into the kinds of positions that women wanted to accept in the first place,” writes Ed Morrissey at Hot Air. I don’t doubt that’s true. I’d find it hard to believe that the Obama administration is discriminating in any way against women.

Unfortunately, that’s not the standard feminist activists and politicians like President Obama apply to the private sector. They expect equal outcomes in pay between men and women, and are willing to give little consideration to the different priorities men and women have for their careers.

But such expectations are unreasonable and unfair. It’s not fair when they’re applied to the Obama administration, and they’re not fair when they’re applied to the private sector.