The White House Gender Pay Gap Is Unreal

While Equal Pay Day was a few months ago, the issue of equality is always timely. Of course, advocates, experts, and feminists of all kinds have fought and worked towards abolishing the gender pay gap, but it won't happen overnight. It requires the dedication and support of everyone involved, and right now, that isn't happening. More troubling, some of the most powerful people in the United States are reportedly some of the worst examples of unequal pay. In particular, the supposed gender pay gap for White House staffers will leave you in shock, and not in a good way.

As The Washington Post reports, new information from economist Mark Perry of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute shows that, in the Trump White House, "The median salaries are $72,648 for women and $115,000 for men." To save you some time, here's what that difference is percentage-wise: 37 percent. There is reportedly a 37 percent difference in the salaries of male and female White House staffers, something on which Ivanka Trump has not yet commented, despite her own remarks that "women deserve equal pay for equal work."

As Ivanka herself has argued in one form or another, female staffers — in this case, White House staffers — should not be making a mere 63 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earn. It just shouldn't be happening, period.

According to Perry's findings, which reportedly contradict a previous reported pay gap of 20 percent, earlier calculations of the White House gender pay gap used average pay, instead of median, which altered results. Media outlets found "the gender pay gap at the Trump White House [was] using mean earnings instead of the median salaries," he wrote. "And in the process, both Roll Call and CNN under-estimate the gender pay gap at the White House by almost 50%: 19.6% based on average salaries versus 36.8% based on median salaries." Romper has reached out to the White House for comment on the reports and is awaiting a response.

Really, though, no gender pay gap is acceptable, but Perry's remarks, if the facts behind them are indeed true, are even more troubling. In a statement directed towards Ivanka, Perry wrote:

If gender differences in median earnings at the national level reflect “unequal pay for equal work,” then wouldn’t that also be the case at the Trump White House? If so, Ivanka should be working really hard to help her father “close the gender pay gap” at the White House, like she pledged in her Tweet above.

All in all, this new information isn't too surprising, although it's still disappointing. The gender pay gap is ridiculous, no matter where it is. But the fact that the White House staffer pay gap is wider than the national average? That's truly disheartening.