It’s Equal Pay Day — and even the White House has a gender pay gap

Chabeli Carrazana, The 19th
March 12, 2024 

MSNBC

Originally published by The 19th.

The disparity in Biden’s White House is slightly smaller than it was in Trump’s, but women still earn less. The biggest difference, though, is in their policies.

Though pay equity has been a policy focus for President Joe Biden, he still hasn’t delivered on parity within his own White House. Women working in the White House were earning 80 cents for every $1 men earned in 2023, a gap wider than the national average, according to an analysis of the most recent data by The 19th.

Tuesday marks Equal Pay Day, when the country recognizes the size of the pay gap between men and women and the work needed to close it. In 2024, women working full-time earn 84 cents for every $1 White men earn. If part-time workers are included, the gap widens further, with women earning 78 cents on the man’s $1 because they are the ones more likely to be working low-paid, part-time jobs.

Equal pay will almost certainly be an issue Biden campaigns on this election year, drawing a contrast with former President Donald Trump. The pay gap among White House employees in Trump’s administration in 2020 was even wider. Women were earning 76 cents for every $1 men earned, The 19th found. The median wage for women working in the Trump White House was $72,700; for men it was $95,350. In Biden’s White House, women’s median wage was $84,000, while men’s was $105,000.

Trump has previously said he promotes women if they’re the best for the job, but actively worked to curtail national pay equity policies. Biden, who has spoken widely about pay equity and tried to push for it through legislation, has still fallen short of passing it.

The pay gaps in the presidents’ White Houses help illuminate just how difficult it is to address an issue like pay equity without targeted legislation, even when a president prioritizes it.

The 19th analyzed the public salary data of both White Houses, which is released every July, and used available records and social media profiles to ascertain gender for nearly 1,000 staffers across both administrations. Because the data is self reported, the White House could not confirm if any staffers were nonbinary. The Trump administration didn’t appear to have any staffers who identified as nonbinary, the National Center for Transgender Equality told The 19th in 2020. There were not sufficient available records to analyze race, and so the White House pay gap is a comparison of the median wage for all women and all men. The 19th’s analysis focuses on only staff hired directly by each administration.

Nationally, the way the pay gap is calculated is by analyzing all the jobs men and women have and comparing the median wages for each group. The figure for women is typically compared with that for White men because they are the highest-paid group that is also a significant portion of the labor force. Asian men earn slightly more but are about 3 percent of the workforce, whereas White men are about a third of it. The pay gap is also a “raw” figure, which means it’s not controlling for other factors such as education or experience. But that doesn’t mean the calculation is not valuable. The gender pay gap is really a reflection of job distribution: Do women and men have the same access to the same types of jobs, particularly higher-paid jobs? The answer, both in the White House and in America, is no.

A consistent concentration of women in the lowest-paid jobs contributed to the wage gap in both administrations. In the Biden White House, the lowest-paid workers were earning under $55,000; 43 women were in that group, compared with 24 men. In the Trump White House, 49 women and 30 men were earning less than $55,000.

That issue is reflected in the broader labor force, too, and is one of the key reasons the U.S. pay gap has remained stubbornly wide, said Jocelyn Frye, the president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a national nonpartisan organization that advocates for family policy.

“There is no panacea. Assuming everybody is operating in good faith and nobody is intentionally trying to underpay people, the reality of how our economy and workplaces are built is that women are often in the jobs that pay less, they’re segregated into those jobs and it’s harder for them to get into the jobs people might view as nontraditional or the leadership positions,” Frye said. “This is a workforce-wide phenomenon.”

During his term, Biden has been a vocal supporter of equal pay, pushing for improved wages for care workers, increasing the minimum wage, enacting a federal paid leave policy and advocating for the passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would close loopholes in pay discrimination laws. None of the legislation that would advance those initiatives at a national level has passed, however, including the Paycheck Fairness Act, which has been consistently reintroduced in Congress since 1997.

Biden has, however, been more successful in improving equity in the federal workforce by raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2022 for 370,000 federal employees and contractors. He also issued a new rule this year that bars more than 80 federal agencies from considering workers’ current or past pay in setting their salaries, a practice that has suppressed wages for women by carrying inequities from one job to the next.

The White House, in response to questions about the pay gap, touted Biden’s work on these fronts.

“The President’s leadership will help deliver fair compensation based on skills, experience, and expertise and adopt commonsense policies that will help pay millions of workers fairly, close gender and racial wage gaps, and yield tangible benefits for the federal government and federal contractors,” a White House spokesperson said in a statement. The administration did not answer broader questions about what it is doing to improve pay parity for its White House staff.

“The Biden administration has really shown its commitment to making the federal government a model employer, and sometimes those changes take time to catch up with the numbers,” said Noreen Farrell, director of Equal Rights Advocates, the organization that leads the Equal Pay Day campaign.

Some of the gap in the Biden White House could be because there is a lot of turnover, particularly in lower-paid positions women are more likely to hold. Likewise, in Trump’s White House, some of the gap can be explained by a dearth of Republican women working in politics. But neither of those things fully explains the gap.

The Biden administration, the first to have a woman vice president, has focused on representation. How many women are in the room? How many are in Congress? But “it is not a one-for-one for power,” said Kelly Dittmar, director of research at the Center for American Women and Politics (CAWP) at Rutgers University.

The Biden administration has “made progress on representation, and that alone is important,” Dittmar said. “But if your goal is you want women to have an equal amount of power and influence in your administration, this to me is an indicator that we may well not be at that point.”

For Trump, the pay gap was never a top issue. In 2017, the former president rolled back several Obama-era pay equity policies. He directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to stop collecting pay data on race and gender from large companies. He also rolled back the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order, which required federal contractors to comply with 14 labor and civil rights laws, including a paycheck transparency rule.

“There was open hostility to the notion that women and men continue to be paid unequally” in the Trump administration, Farrell said.

The 2024 Trump campaign did not respond to a request for comment from The 19th. In 2020, then-press secretary Kayleigh McEnany told The 19th that “President Trump has taken unprecedented action to support women and girls.”

The majority of staffers in Trump’s 2020 White House, about 52 percent, were also men. When considering detailees, longtime staffers from other agencies assigned to the White House to provide expertise, the gap in Trump’s White House widened further, with women earning 69 cents for every $1 earned by men.

In Biden’s White House, the gap narrows when detailees are counted, with women earning 93 cents on the man’s $1. About 60 percent of Biden’s White House is made up of women.

“It is a positive thing that when you add in the detailees that number goes up [for Biden] because it tells me something about senior women who are brought over into the White House,” Frye said.

Republicans are more likely to say that women’s choices about family and work are the major reason the pay gap exists. Only 18 percent of Republican men believe the pay gap is a result of employers treating women differently, compared with 43 percent of Republican women, 59 percent of Democratic men and 76 percent of Democratic women, according to a 2022 poll by the Pew Research Center.

Biden is also much more likely to discuss the pay gap than Trump is. While Biden did not address it directly in last week’s State of the Union address, he did talk about the importance of child care and paid leave as economic issues, both factors that influence the gap.

Another study by Pew last year found that the pay gap starts to widen for women when they have children. The more likely a woman is to have a child under 18 at home, the wider the gap becomes, Pew found.

But Biden’s efforts to pass a massive national child care expansion and federal paid leave policy have failed. Ahead of the election, he’ll have to convince voters who prioritize these issues, particularly women, that he can get the job done.

The White House pay gap figures could give voters “a space and a reminder to ask the question of not only what policies is the administration putting forth for the country, but how are they addressing this type of inequity and gap in their own ranks. It’s important that they have an answer for that,” Dittmar said. “Good leaders should be aware of where their institutions are falling short.”

Merdie Nzanga, a 19th editorial fellow, contributed to this report.