Here’s encouraging news: It seems President Obama and his top staffers not only read The Post but learn from it.
On Tuesday on these pages, we predicted the White House would commemorate Equal Pay Day by spreading the misleading claim that women earn 77 cents for every dollar men are paid — which is just what the president did. We noted this figure is meaningless, because it’s an apples-to-oranges comparison. When women are compared with men who have the same jobs, experience, education and so on, the so-called wage gap almost disappears.
Turns out, this is precisely the argument Jay Carney gave the same day when he was challenged about the administration’s own wage gap — with women at the Obama White House earning just 88 cents for every dollar their male colleagues earn.
“We have two deputy chiefs of staff, one man and one woman, and they make the same salary,” Carney explained. “We have 16 department heads. Over half of them are women, all of whom make the same salary as their male counterparts.” The president’s press spokesman is right: Apples must be compared to apples.
Carney wasn’t the only one backpedaling. Betsey Stevenson, a member of the White House Council on Economic Advisers, took back her own claims about the 77-cent figure when questioned by a reporter. “If I said 77 cents was equal pay for equal work, then I completely misspoke,” she admitted.
Carney and Stevenson might want to let Scott Stringer in on the problem with this comparison. Because in his own contribution to Equal Pay Day, our new comptroller produced a local version of the misleading 77-cent argument.
In his study, Stringer claims the average full-time working woman in the city earns only 82 cents for every dollar a working man makes. Although invoked to prove discrimination, all it really illustrates is that we have a comptroller willing to rely on the same dubious analysis even the Obama White House has now admitted doesn’t make for a fair comparison.
Women have come a long way in the American work force, and those achievements should not be diminished or denied. If The New York Post’s public service has left President Obama’s White House with a view of male-female pay more rooted in science than politics, count us delighted.