The Patriot Post® · Biden's War on Women's Wages
During his campaign, Joe Biden promised that he would work to “close the gender pay gap,” playing to the Left’s bogus narrative that sexism is to blame. Again in March of this year, the Biden administration released its list of “Commitments to Advance Pay Equity and Support Women’s Economic Security.” Prominently featured was the supposed gender pay gap that on average saw working women in 2020 earn 83 cents on the dollar compared to working men. Then came the assumed reason for that gap — discrimination — with the pledge that the Biden administration would bring various special interest groups together to “tackle pay discrimination, create good-paying jobs, and support families’ access to care.”
The cause of the gender wage gap today — where it even actually exists — has virtually nothing to do with sexism. So it comes as little surprise that the Biden administration’s commitment to close the gap has not been accomplished even at the White House.
Recently released pay records for the White House show that women working in the West Wing earn on average $16,000 less annually than men. The median salary for women working in Biden’s White House is $83,467 compared to $100,000 for men. In fact, the gender pay gap in the White House is almost exactly in line with the rest of the country. So, is it fair to charge Biden with sexist discrimination against women employees? Well, if we were woke Democrats we could, but that would be to ignore the truth of the matter.
When work hours, job skills, and overall experience of all the employees are factored into the equation, the pay gap is quickly reduced to near zero. The biggest factor in the White House has to do with the overall number of women versus men working for Biden. There are 235 female employees to 173 male. Just that simple difference in number explains much of the disparity because there are more younger, less experienced women working in the White House than there are men.
As economist and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Mark Perry contends: “The next time you hear the Biden administration citing a national gender pay gap of 17 percent based on median earnings and using that difference to advance measures to achieve greater pay equity and address gender discrimination, it should be noted that Biden’s own White House has a similar pay gap of 16.5 percent. In both cases, those differences in earnings by gender are not primarily the result of gender discrimination but are the result of many other factors.”
When Biden and the Democrats make their bogus gender pay gap claims, it is simply a political canard designed to play to their largest voting base, (angry) women. The reality is that gender-based pay discrimination has been illegal in the U.S. since the passage of the Equal Pay Act back in 1963. If sexism is to blame for the gender pay gap, then one would think the government has everything needed to prosecute employers engaged in breaking the law. But the facts of the matter are that gender-based discrimination is simply not what is causing the pay gap. Rather, it can be chalked up almost entirely to individual choice.
When people are free to choose to make their own employment and life choices, they make different decisions. And it has been repeatedly proven that women in general are more family and community oriented, whereas men are more career oriented. Neither is inherently good or bad, wrong or right, but the difference is just one of many between the two sexes. Rather than claiming the wage gap is inherently a problem, the honest response would be to show more concern if there were no wage gap at all because that would be a sign of a society that has severely limited individual choice.