White House Pay Gap
Via Dana Goldstein, Ariel Boone earns a link by doing the work to put this chart together illustrating the earnings gap between men and women in the Obama White House. Total employment is split almost 50-50 between men and women, but the women are disproportionately concentrated in the lowest-level positions:
This is pretty much the same pattern you see everywhere, so not incredibly shocking. On the other hand, partisan politics has a distinct gender skew; about half of people are women, but well more than half of Democrats are women and in general women have more progressive views than men. Failing to locate talented women and promote them to positions of office and authority leaves progressives drawing from a relatively small talent pool given that numerically our “side” is preponderantly female.
22 Responses to “White House Pay Gap”
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July 14th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Thanks for the shout-out, Matt; I like your comment about women making up >60% of the Democratic Party– yet another reason why inclusivity’s important!
July 14th, 2009 at 4:56 pm
Sweet. The jokes I was going to make is already here.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:21 pm
“…general women have more progressive views than men. Failing to locate talented women…”
Sometime the Yglesias anti-progressive impulse sneaks through the conscious.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:27 pm
When I walked into a McKinsey office a few months ago I did notice that all three front desk receptionists were young men — how common is this? I assume McKinsey was trying to make a point.
July 14th, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Well, well. Surprise, surprise. I do not understand why anyone would think Democrats are much better than Republicans when it comes to changing the demands of institutional hierarchies. I just heard that the Democratic party in IL is upset because Lisa Madigan will not run for a Senate seat. Why? Well, maybe she doesn’t want to leave IL just now. Why? She has two young daughters. Why would she make that decision? Obama didn’t…
July 14th, 2009 at 5:50 pm
I hate to be a stick in the mud, but I don’t think the title ‘pay gap’ is really accurate. This chart does nothing to show that those of the same position (and possibly seniority) are getting paid differently. I highly doubt this is the case given the pay grades are governed by OMB.
My very speculative read is that there are a lot of female interns and a lot of top level males. Of course, as the post mentions, why isn’t Obama hiring more top level women is a good point.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:17 pm
Here are some questions about Matt’s father’s industry:
Out of the 400 or so Best Director Oscar nominations, how many have gone to women?
Out of all Cinematography nominations, how many have gone to women?
When did women win more screenwriting Oscars? Before feminism or after?
July 14th, 2009 at 6:20 pm
By the way, it’s amusing how few Democrats protested at the way Barack Obama spun his $300,000 per year wife during the campaign as a cookie-baking earth mother.
July 14th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
It’s also ironic how liberals and feminists completely folded when Obama decided he wanted the demon of sexism himself, Larry Summers, at his right hand.
Could it possibly be that Obama doesn’t take feminism seriously?
July 14th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
Am I the only one who doesn’t find that chart particularly stunning? I mean, there’s some gender disparity, and that’s obviously not what you want. But it really does not, to me, look like an outrage to justice.
July 14th, 2009 at 8:24 pm
Am I the only one who is finding the wingnuttery on this comment thread particularly incoherent? What are they all talking about?
And what is it about crazies that they feel the need to post three times in a row, instead of one post that is somewhat longer?
July 14th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Matt, I have to say this appears to be much ado about not much. Yes, there is a higher percentage of women in the lower-paying jobs (120 vs 100) in the under $60K range, but the only way to balance that range would be to fire ten women and replace them with ten men.
In the $60K-100K range, there are 55 women and 56 men.
In the $100-$130K range, there are 17 women and 28 men. ***
In the $130-170K range, there are 25 women and 30 men.
I think you have to sort of exclude the $170+ spots from the general discussion — these are all exactly $172,200, and are folks like Rahm, Gibbs, Jarrett, Browner, etc.
*** so, other than the delta of 20 in the 220 lower-paid jobs, the only big discrepancy is in the $100-130K job range. Arguably, many of these appear to be jobs where a specific individual is not called for (except Reggie Love), so perhaps Obama should have tried harder to find six or seven more good women for some of these spots.
But overall, I really don’t see a big issue. Oh, and as for you point that Dem women tend to be more progressive than men — Obama is not a progressive, dude.
July 14th, 2009 at 11:20 pm
you make the point that more than half of dems are women. how big is the disparity as you start to whittle down the field to the sorts of qualifications you might look for in senior white house staff? i just haven’t seen the numbers. does it still hold true that a significant majority of, say, democratic law school grads are women, or MBA grads, or whatever other steps people take to find themselves in the upper echelon of parties?
July 15th, 2009 at 12:09 am
This disparity, while its visible, doesn’t seem all that glaring in the charts.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:42 am
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July 15th, 2009 at 12:42 am
When Matt pretends like this to care about feminist stuff, he uses as little of his brain as possible.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:46 am
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July 15th, 2009 at 1:08 am
The relevant metric should be whether people get the same pay for the same job – otherwise this is just not an honest comparion. What does it prove, precisely, if the mix of jobs that men and women do is different? Are their ages the same on average? Is the mean more different than the median?
July 15th, 2009 at 8:38 am
I suppose it never occurred to Mr. Yglesias that a lot of women may not want to sacrifice family and childbearing in order to achieve the wealth and power associated with a high status and high paying position. Most women, for innate natural reasons, place more importance on having children than on the Pot, Porn and Playstations lifestyle that Georgetown cocktail partygoers seem to endorse. No, of course not, it has to be discrimination. Which I don’t doubt exists in the broader society, but it seems unlikely in the extreme that the Obama regime is a hotbed of anti-women discrimination. Of course, lots of things never occur to Mr. Yglesias. Particularly when it comes to the glaring deficiencies of feminism.
July 15th, 2009 at 9:59 am
It seems to me that Ariel (who Matt linked to) has interpreted her own data completely backwards.
The fact that the White House senior staff (itself largely male, owing their jobs to having earned them during the campaign) has gone out and hired a junior staff that is majority female is exactly the sort of pattern-breaking affirmative action that is necessary to create a future in which there are qualified women to compete for all the senior-level jobs.
Of course, if they’d just gone ahead and replicated previous generations’ sexism and hired a junior staff that was 70-30 male, there wouldn’t be a “pay gap” between men and women in the WH. Even “better” – they could have hired only men for the entry-level jobs, and then when you averaged in Valarie Jarret and the few senior-level women, you’d find that men “only make 80 cents on the dollar…”, etc.
It’s a shame that doing the right thing can be manipulated by people who have a minimal grasp of statistics to look like doing the wrong thing.
July 15th, 2009 at 10:37 am
Steve Sailer Says:
“It’s also ironic how liberals and feminists completely folded when Obama decided he wanted the demon of sexism himself, Larry Summers, at his right hand.”
That’s odd – I haven’t run into many liberals, if any, who supported that POS. Frankly if I had the power, he’d be breaking rocks for 20 to life.
July 15th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
So that’s what they’re calling black women nowadays. Michelle Obama comes off about a dozen ways better than the previous First Lady.