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Apparently, Mr. Obama, despite his rhetoric to the contrary, pays his female staffers less than his male staffers. Possibly even more surprising is that Mr. McCain actually pays his female staffers more than his male staffers. This begs the question: Who is the real feminist?
In both cases, the primary root of the inequality is the gender make up of top advisers, who get paid more. Mr. Obama has fewer women as senior advisers, and Mr. McCain has more. Only one of the Mr. Obama's top five staffers(by pay) is a women, as opposed to three of Mr. McCain's. The same dynamic extends out to the top 20 staffers(by pay).
This would be less shameful is Mr. Obama had not used the rhetoric about the need for women to make equal pay for equal work, and using the old 77 cents on the dollar figure. This is simply untrue. When all factors are equal, women make significantly more money than men. Men are simply more likely to prioritize their career.
This begs the question, who is the real feminist? The man who pays his female staffers less, has less female advisers and who passed over a more qualified woman for VP because she threatened to overshadow him? Or the man who pays his female staffer more, has more of them, and nominated a women to be his running mate?
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3 comments:
Both Jenny and Joe have two employees, a doctor and a janitor. Jenny pays her male doctor $600,000 and her female janitor $100,000, while Joe pays his female doctor $200,000 and his male janitor $100,000. Both the Editor and his (or her?!) sources would have you believe that Jenny treats women much worse than Joe does, because Joes average female wage is higher than Jenny's. The strange thing is, in the very next breath they acknowledge the real issue, the difference in the percentage of female upper level employees. But that is not the same as equal pay for equal work. And either they don't understand the difference, or they are deliberately misleading their readers. Neither is good. The shame is yours, Editor.
I would actually say the larger issue is that Mr. Obama's top advisers are disproportionately male, while he claims the moral high ground of defending women. That is, in addition to overlooking a woman who was clearly (by even the admission of the person selected for the job) more qualified for his VP.
The pay differential, which I noted in my original post was related to the seniority of the positions, is only relevant in that Mr. Obama continues to use misleading data to claim that women do not receive equal pay for equal work, when clearly not only do they receive equal pay, they receive 117% of what men do for the exact same job. If Mr. Obama is going to engage in this type of deceit, he should be prepared to have the logic he uses used against him, in addition to more evenhanded logic.
This post is very interesting, and it certainly appears to put Obama's camp in an exceedingly bad light. I have to wonder if the lack of female representation in the higher ups of the Obama campaign is (even partly) due to the partitioning of liberal experts during the primary season. While Clinton was backed by a number of powerful men, it appears to me that she overwhelming commanded a force of democratic women. Since the democratic primary was exceedingly fierce by anyone's standards, even without the VP question, I'd be very curious to hear how many Clinton supporters were willing to cross camps once the nomination was secured by Obama, compared to a similar situation in past elections.
Regardless, Obama should continue to invest in the advice of senior female political experts at any price, and Clinton should encourage her followers to provide that expertise to the democratic party.
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