Do you remember that oh-so-revealing photo of the president’s inner circle of confidantes, assembled in the Oval Office on Dec. 29? If you don’t, the image is here for your edification. When liberal media outlets, spearheaded by The New York Times, complained that there were no skirts in the picture, the White House scrambled to release a “revised” photo. Suddenly, three of the staffers had metamorphosed into women. (The lone black male in the original photo also vanished, but that’s a story for another day.)
Now the Obama administration has a new headache to worry about, and this one will not be remedied by a snapshot. The Daily Caller performed an “analysis of the administration’s ‘2012 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff’” and determined that women staffers earned about 13 percent less on average than their male counterparts:
The median 2012 salary for female employees of the White House was $62,000; for men that number was $71,000.
While the gender-driven pay disparity represents an improvement over the 2011 pay gap — during that year women in the White House earned 18 percent less than men — the hypocrisy is hard to overlook for an administration that has dedicated itself to fighting a self-declared “war on women” purportedly waged by the right.
The president has already taken considerable flak from women’s groups over the infamous photo of his male-centric inner circle. No less a feminist tag team than Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem took Obama to task in an op-ed at CNN’s website last Friday, writing:
[Obama] wouldn’t have been re-elected without 55 percent of the women’s vote, something he earned by representing women’s majority views on issues, yet now he seems to be ignoring women’s ability to be not only voters, but leaders.
Obama defended himself, somewhat testily, firing back:
So if you think about my first four years, the person who probably had the most influence on my foreign policy was a woman. The people who were in charge of moving forward my most important domestic initiative, health care, were women. The person in charge of our homeland security was a woman. My two appointments to the Supreme Court were women. And 50 percent of my White House staff were women. So I think people should expect that that record will be built upon during the next four years.
It will be interesting to hear how he hopes to extricate himself from the pay snafu. Maybe toward that end, he should begin accumulating binders full of women.
Related Articles
- WH takes flak for ‘male-centric’ inner circle, publishes revised photo (Photos)
- The left’s not-so-faux war on women
- 6-year-old airs grievances over gender imbalance (Photos)
- New Obama survey: White males need not stand up and be counted
- Sandra Fluke: Pols should be given ‘pro-woman’ litmus test prior to election
- Celeb chefs join 13-year-old’s crusade for gender-neutral EZ Bake Oven (Photos)
- ‘A Better Life for Julia’
- What ‘The Life of Julia’ really tells us
- A journalist’s guide to neutering the English language
- Latest feminist complaint: You never see the Virgin Mary breastfeeding Jesus
- College orders construction crew to remove sexist ‘men working’ sign
- UNC drops term ‘freshman’ in favor of ‘gender-inclusive’ language
- Bristol Palin open letter asks: ‘Mr. President, when should I expect your call?’
- New DNC chair calls GOP women ‘anti-women’; GOP females fight back
- DNC chair slams GOP for not backing U.S. auto industry, drives an import herself
- Obama campaign e-card: ‘Can I borrow $18,000 for birth control’
- The Lilly Ledbetter Act does not ensure women equal pay for equal work
