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16

Analysis finds White House women paid less than men


To Love My Country has posted an analysis about White House salaries, based on a previously released list that came from the White House (talk about excellent primary source blogging).

First, the idea behind the post, as explained by the blogger:

The commentary here is intended to provoke thought about why men dominate the higher positions– where’s the disconnect? Is it women not majoring in Poli Sci at the same rates? Is it post-graduation job choices? Is it because the last administration to serve in was the predom. male Clinton administration? This post is a question, not an answer.

The comments on the thread are worth reading as well for more explanations.

So what did Ariel Boone find (but please, go read the entire post, in context; emphasis shown below is in the original):

And some notes from Ariel at the end:

  • Besides making “assumptions” about the 487 names, there were about 50 gender-ambiguous names (Ashley, Jamia, Tracy, etc) that I researched to confirm the person’s pronouns. I do realize this process is not trans-inclusive. Numbers and the data table have been edited since the original posting to reflect 3 miscategorized employees.
  • Patricia McGinnis and Michael Warren were counted into the total number of employees, but not into the salary averages and medians, as both earned $0.00
  • The total percentage of staff includes detailees, but the average salary does not. Detailees are essentially employees on loan from other federal agencies, whose salaries are determined and paid for by the other agencies.

So now what?  Few people if any will find this information surprising.  The question is: what needs to be changed and how do we change it?

Matt Yglesias at ThinkProgress links to Ariel’s work too and there are some good comments in that thread.

What do you think?

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 12:39 pm July 16th, 2009 in Barack Obama, Business, Civil Rights, Economy, Gender, Government, Politics, Sexism, Social Issues, Whitehouse09, Women, employment, leadership 

Comments

One Response to “Analysis finds White House women paid less than men”

  1. 1 Danine Spencer on July 16th, 2009 1:30 pm

    I wrote about this a few weeks about for the AAUW blog http://blog-aauw.org/2009/07/08/pay-equity-in-the-obama-white-house/#comment-3717. I had limited resources and had to omit 34 names because I couldn’t identify their gender. I was also limited to 600 words which influenced my analysis.

    -Danine Spencer

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