Does Hillary Clinton Care About the Gender Pay Gap? She Didn’t When She Was a Senator
Despite the belief that Hillary Clinton is a feminist candidate, she doesn't always practice what she preaches. As a U.S. senator, Clinton paid female staff members 72 cents for every dollar that she paid males, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Hillary Clinton speaking in Washington, D.C., in 2010, during her tenure as secretary of state. (Northern Ireland Executive / CC BY-ND 2.0)
It’s a widely cited statistic that American women are paid only about 77 cents for each dollar that their male counterparts receive in the same jobs. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even tweeted the figure back in 2014:
20 years ago, women made 72 cents on the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do. #EqualPay #NoCeilings
— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) April 9, 2014
Yet, despite the belief that Hillary Clinton is a feminist candidate, she doesn’t always practice what she preaches. As a U.S. senator of New York, Clinton took the gender pay disparity a few cents further, paying her female staff members only 72 cents on the dollar, according to The Washington Free Beacon.
Hillary Clinton portrays herself as a champion of women in the workforce, but women working for her in the U.S. Senate were paid 72 cents for each dollar paid to men, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis of her Senate years’ salary data.
During those years, the median annual salary for a woman working in Clinton’s office was $15,708.38 less than the median salary for a man, according to the analysis of data compiled from official Senate expenditure reports.
The analysis compiled the annual salaries paid to staffers for an entire fiscal year of work from the years 2002 to 2008. Salaries of employees who were not part of Clinton’s office for a full fiscal year were not included. Because the Senate fiscal year extends from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, Clinton’s first year in the Senate, which began on Jan. 3, 2001, was also not included in the analysis.
Despite the numbers, Clinton and her allies have long-touted her as “a fighter for equal pay.”
Read more here.
— Posted by Natasha Hakimi Zapata
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