White House still has a 16 percent wage gap

(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Per the calculations of economist Mark Perry at the American Enterprise Institute, the Obama White House maintains a 15.8 percent wage gap, with women earning 84.2 cents for every dollar male staffers take home. Perry used the White House's self-reported salary data to tabulate this gap, which marks a slight decrease compared to last year's 17.9 percent. Still, it translates to an average of $12,350 less for female employees each year.

Perry argues that the disparity can be explained either by alleging the president participates in the wage discrimination he has so often decried — or by admitting that other factors, like "age, years of continuous work experience, education, differences in positions, hours worked, marital status, number of children, workplace environment and safety, industry differences, etc." may tend to give women lower average salaries than men.

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.