President Donald Trump’s disrespectful treatment of women is nothing new. In the past week alone, he’s made vile comments about MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski in response to her critizing him on air and patronizingly called a female reporter over to his desk just to compliment her smile. His latest sleight toward women is less flashy, but possibly more insidious than those other two: His administration has drastically increased the salary disparity between men and women working in the White House.
Every year on July 1, the White House is required to disclose the pay of its employees. When Mark J. Perry, an economist at the conservative think tank The American Enterprise Institute, analyzed the data, he found that “The typical female staffer in Trump’s White House earns 63.2 cents per $1 earned by a typical male staffer,” Perry writes.
Compare that to the final year of Barack Obama’s administration, where the gap closed to women making 11% less than men at the White House, and that’s a more than three-fold increase in the gender pay gap at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The median White House female staffer under Trump makes $72,650 while the median salary for men is $115,000. Perry also notes in his analysis that of the top 101 highest-paid White House employees, nearly 75% of them are men.
When The Washington Post’s Wonkblog saw Perry’s analysis, they charted how Trump compared not only to Obama’s White House, but also to George W. Bush’s administration, showing Trump performing far worse than the 43rd president.
Trump’s White House hiring practices fit with polices he’s made as president regarding the gender pay gap. A few months ago, he rolled back Obama-era equal pay protections for women with an executive order.
The findings also continue to show the hollowness of Ivanka Trump. She’s more than willing to tweet about closing the gender pay gap to build her personal brand, write with a straight face that she was “proud to work towards this goal alongside my father and in support of the administration’s commitment to women and families,” and profit off of books with warmed-over cliches about working women, but when it comes to actually advancing the principles she espouses (cough, Paris climate accords, cough), she does little of actual consequence.
