Gender Pay Gap at the White House

And, challenges remain in ensuring equal pay for equal work. In 2022, among all salary workers in the White House, a woman made just 80 cents every dollar paid to a man.

This is from a blog post written by an economist with President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. It takes some courage to call out “the big guy,” aka Joe Biden, for paying women less than men, but the economist who wrote it had that courage.

Oops. I got it wrong. It was economist Mark J. Perry who pointed out that the median pay for female workers in the White House is only 80 percent of the median pay for male White House workers.

The CEA blogger wrote this:

And, challenges remain in ensuring equal pay for equal work. In 2022, among all wage and salary workers usually working full-time, a woman made just 83 cents for every dollar paid to a man.

According to that blogger, this is a problem. The blogger did not address the gender pay gap in the White House.

Here are the White House data.

Interestingly, the blogger did not point out an even bigger gender gap in the workplace: the gap between fatalities for male workers and those for female workers.

Mark J. Perry has also presented good material on this. Men suffer 91.4 percent of fatal injuries on the job, versus 8.6 precent for women.

The most dangerous occupation in the United States is logging, where the fatal injury rate is 82.2 per 100,000 workers and where 96.0 percent of the people in the occupation are male. Underground mining, an occupation I had when I was 18, is the 8th most dangerous, with 26.7 deaths per 100,000 workers and with 99.0 percent of the workers being male.

Should we get more women in those occupations to close that fatality gender gap?

Note: In David R. Henderson, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Claudia Golden of Harvard writes on the “Gender Gap.”