News Flash:
DNC War on Women Intensifies
That’s the headline from a Washington Free Beacon story that examined Federal Election Commission salary data and found that female employees at the Democratic National Committee (DN) are paid 15 percent less than men who work at the DNC.
The Beacon’s Andrew Stiles reports:
The DNC’s 119 female employees earned $3,342 on average in the month of July, compared to $3,843 for its 113 male employees. On an annualized basis, the average female DNC employee would earn roughly $6,000 less than her male coworkers.
The median female salary ($2,926) for July was also about 15 percent less than the median male salary ($3,370).
The results are consistent with those of other Free Beacon reviews of salary data for the White House, Democratic members of Congress, and President Obama’s re-election campaign.
In 2011, female White House employees made about 18 percent less than their male counterparts, the Free Beacon found.
More than a dozen Democratic Senators paid their female staff members at least 20 percent less than male staffers during that same period.
The Obama campaign’s recent filings with the FEC revealed that it paid women more than 5 percent less than men during the months of May and June.
This data is of particular interest because of Democrat claims that Republicans are waging a “war on women.” Based on this salary data, the Democrat idea of supporting women seems to be entirely limited to forcing Father O’Reilly to pay for her birth control pills. I can’t help wondering if, given a choice between contraceptives without a co-pay and a 15 percent pay hike, even contraception activist and Georgetown U law student Sandra Fluke might opt for the latter.
Yes, this data does raise the disturbing possibility that our Democrat friends are male chauvinist pigs who take advantage of us womyn folk, all the while while claiming to be our pals. But there is another possibility: this wage gap is the product of economic realities that the Democrats, at least in their policies and attacks on the free market, are loath to recognize.
The so-called wage, whereby women tend to earn slightly less than men, is beloved of Democrats—it gives them an excuse to enact all sorts of new laws aimed at reducing the discrepancy, which they claim is the result of discrimination. In reality, when women’s choices (to drop out of the workforce for a few years to raise children, to work fewer hours, or have more flexibility on the job) are factored in, the wage gap shrinks. Female college graduates in urban centers actually out-earn their male counterparts, further giving lie to the notion of discrimination.
We don’t know why the Democrats pay women less. But here’s something we do know—as is nicely stated by the Free Beacon story:
Such findings undermine the concerted effort by the Democratic Party to portray Republicans as waging a “war on women.”
In June, Senate Democrats levied the charge against the GOP for opposing the so-called “Paycheck Fairness Act,” a bill that would make it easier for trial lawyers to file lucrative class action lawsuits over claims of gender pay discrimination.
Critics called the legislation “an employment act for trial lawyers,” noting that the trial lawyer industry is the top source of campaign contributions for all but five members of the Senate Democratic caucus.
The pay disparity among DNC employees is particularly striking given that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D., Fla.) has been one of the most vocal propagators of the “war on women” charge.
A word to Democrats: pay up, or shut up.