We have all heard the statistic that women earn 77 cents on the dollar when compared to their male counterparts. While it is true that gender bias may be the underlying factors in a small fraction of those cases, generalizing the entire workforce as being unfair to women is absurd. An employees pay encompasses many variables, the most important being experience, however as been noted by myself and others, willingness to negotiate plays a large part as well. There have been several studies which would indicate that men are more likely to ask for higher pay than women, explaining a large portion of the pay gap between the sexes.

Barack Obama prefers to overlook these variables and focus more on the broad statistic that women earn 77 cents per dollar. He also discounts the fact that this statistic does not take into account different industries and education levels, because lets face facts, the 23% lower salaries he cites sounds much more drastic then the 11% difference found when looking at men and women who are in similar professions and have similar education levels. Obama has even gone so far as to say that he be a better proponent for women’s equal pay than John McCain would:

“I’ll continue to stand up for equal pay as president — Senator McCain won’t, and that’s a real difference in this election,” Obama said.

As the old saying goes however, actions speak louder than words. A recent report by CNS News shows that while Obama talks the talk, McCain is walking the walk. The average woman working in Senator Obama’s office earn $6,000 below the average man:

On average, women working in Obama’s Senate office were paid at least $6,000 below the average man working for the Illinois senator. That’s according to data calculated from the Report of the Secretary of the Senate, which covered the six-month period ending Sept. 30, 2007. Of the five people in Obama’s Senate office who were paid $100,000 or more on an annual basis, only one — Obama’s administrative manager — was a woman.

The average pay for the 33 men on Obama’s staff (who earned more than $23,000, the lowest annual salary paid for non-intern employees) was $59,207. The average pay for the 31 women on Obama’s staff who earned more than $23,000 per year was $48,729.91. (The average pay for all 36 male employees on Obama’s staff was $55,962; and the average pay for all 31 female employees was $48,729. The report indicated that Obama had only one paid intern during the period, who was a male.)

McCain, an Arizona senator, employed a total of 69 people during the reporting period ending in the fall of 2007, but 23 of them were interns. Of his non-intern employees, 30 were women and 16 were men. After excluding interns, the average pay for the 30 women on McCain’s staff was $59,104.51. The 16 non-intern males in McCain’s office, by comparison, were paid an average of .

Those statistics are even more striking when comparing the women on Obama’s staff to the women on McCain’s staff. While the men on both Senator’s staffs are paid relatively equally ($56,628.83 for McCain and $55,962 for Obama), their is a wide gap among the women. Senator Obama pays his female employees a mere 82 cents on the dollar as compared to the female employees working for Senator McCain.

If Obama truly was a proponent of equal pay for women you would think that his own female employees would benefit from it. Instead, as we have seen in the past, Obama’s words are nothing more than rhetoric.

Hat Tip Hotair.com

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Barack Obama, Election 2008, Features, John McCain, Politics