It had to be done—I broke down the White House’s July 1 report on staff salaries and compiled a data table to look at the status of women in the administration we voted for.
Key Findings
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NUMBERS OF FEMALE AND MALE STAFF ARE EQUAL: Out of a total of 487 employees, women comprise 49.7% of the White House staff!
That is very close to the nationwide population average; 50.9% of Americans are women, according to US Census numbers from 2000. But should we be judging by a population benchmark? Of the Class of 2009, women were awarded close to 60% of all degrees, including Associate’s, Bachelor’s, Master’s, Professional, and Doctoral. The perceived gap between female WH employees and female graduates entering the workforce is larger: 49.7% vs 60%.
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WOMEN EARN LESS: On average, a White House woman earns $9,462 less than a White House man.
The average salary for a male employee is $82,020, while the average for a female employee is $72,558. Women are earning $0.88 for every $1.00 men make. Heck, that's better than the national average of $0.77. But alone, these averages DO NOT confirm that White House women are paid less than men in comparable positions. Here, averages only imply differences in seniority and pay level. A woman’s median WH salary is $57,129, while a man’s median WH salary is $67,059. Where is this disparity occurring?
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WOMEN ARE IN LOWER PAID POSITIONS: in the lowest earning brackets , $30,000-$59,999, the number of female employees outstrips the number of men .
From the data table , the position titles for these lower-paying jobs stand out as traditional women’s (lower-level) positions: Staff Assistant, Correspondence Analyst, Executive Assistant, Greetings Coordinator, Scheduler, and Receptionist . A trend emerges, especially from the $90,000-129,999 and $140,000-179,999 brackets: women are employed in the White House for traditionally lower level positions, but are outnumbered at the levels of senior staff. Rudimentary statistics tells us correlation does not imply causation. Because it is impossible to compare the seniority of every employee granted the title "Staff Assistant," these figures say nothing of hiring practices or of attitudes toward women in the administration. But it is disappointing to see just as government functions as a large corporation, people at the highest levels are increasingly male. Is this like the Women's Campaign Forum's findings that women must be encouraged to run for office? Are women reluctant to step up to positions of higher seniority? Do women receive preference in traditionally lower-ranking administrative jobs? Or, as Sen. Amy Klobuchar commented today during Judge Sotomayor's confirmation hearing...
So, I think it's worth remembering that when Justice O'Connor graduated from law school, the only offers she got from law firms were for legal secretary positions. Justice O'Connor - who graduated third in her class at Stanford Law School - saw her accomplishments reduced to one question: "Can she type?"In this White House, we can't know for sure. Notes about my process:
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Besides making “assumptions” about the 487 names, there were about 50 gender-ambiguous names (Ashley, Jamia, Tracy, etc) that I researched to confirm the person’s pronouns. I do realize this process is not trans-inclusive.
Patricia McGinnis and Michael Warren were counted into the total number of employees, but not into the salary averages and medians, as both earned $0.00.
The total percentage of staff was includes detailees, but the average salary does not. Detailees are essentially employees on loan from other federal agencies, whose salaries are determined and paid for by the other agencies.
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"The perceived gap between female WH employees and female graduates entering the workforce is larger: 49.7% vs 60%."
That 60% is disingenuous. The 60% is current entry level employees. Most white house staff is not straight out of college.
Pepper, look at the page I linked to about the degrees awarded (http://mjperry.blogspot.com/2009/06/women-dominate-higher-education-at.html) -- women have earned more degrees than men since 1982. It's been above 55% since 2000. The education level is there; the 60% numbers were simply to represent where we are today. Another point that Matt Yglesias made is that women make up about 60% of the Democratic party. These figures just accentuate that with such a large female talent pool, there is a gap between those hired and those qualified.
And many white house staff are straight out of college. Some even barely finished college, because they dropped out to work on the campaign and then were offered jobs.
While this is true across all degrees combined, there is not gender equity or higher female degrees conferred in all degree fields. It is very heavily weighted depending on type of degree. For updated numbers on degrees conferred in the US by field and gender, you can use the NCES IPEDS data. A sample chart is available here: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d07/tables/dt07_265.asp
Women are proportionally still earning more degrees in the fields that tend to receive lower salaries - whether the prestige of field or the gendering of the field is the cause of the lower salary.
I think the point you make in your reply to Kisekelia is a stronger point Ariel. The senior positions in the WH reflect enrollment patterns of 20-40 years ago. The easiest & best way to look for bias would be compare WH staffing to private sector staffing.
As far as Matt Yglesias "60%" point, that's apples & oranges. I have a number of friends & relatives very active in Democrat politics. I'm not sure canvassing, fundraising, phone banking or even getting elected as a Democrat qualifies someone to work in the WH...particularly for a "technocrat" like BO. As far as "many WH staffers are straight out of college" I'd double check that. I think few, if any, are straight out of undergrad; though perhaps a handful are straight out of graduate school (but probably had experience prior to grad school).
Thank you so much for analyzing that - how interesting/disappointing/not that surprising... but I really appreciate you putting that all together.
"The total percentage of staff was includes detailees"
can she type? Answer: No
Most whithouse staff, as pointed out have not come straight from finishing education.
ForwardPink, you made many grammatical errors in your comment too and you also misspelled a word. Why the nastiness? I don't udnderstand. It's a great post and you can comment on the content. I am considering reporting you.
I think it's understandable to be annoyed when a writer doesn't proof-read their piece, but there is a more tactful way to comment on such an issue.
haha i did spell whitehouse wrong, how embarassing, it pays to proof read.
don't go all indecisive on me now, anyway my last paragraph (if you can call them that) remains unanswered, reporting someone isn't a way to answer :o
You caught me. It's corrected on my blog; however, I'm unable to edit this page.
Wow, a pretty tremendous amount of research, Ariel, and I'm glad you got at what's driving the difference in pay scales. I'd agree with the other posters that few WH staff are straight out of college. I'd imagine that since most of these staffers graduated college 20+ years ago, its actually much more diverse than the private sector.
It'd be interesting if you were to expand the research. You might find out if there's a discrepancy when controlling for experience & job level. Or, you might reference some anectdotal stories. Three recent one's come to mind. We've had senior women staffers leave both BO's staff & Michelle's staff for other gov't posts seeking better work-life balance (see Wash Post). Also, there's a story in the Chi Trib about how most staffers, including the women, took very substantial pay cuts to join the WH. ( http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-white-house-pay-jul02,0,5777765.story ) Collectively, at least, it doesn't look as if there's any bias at work in pay scales.
Fantastic post ariel! Thank you so much for this original and important analysis. It's a great informative read put together in a way that someone like myself, who doesn't have a head for numbers, can easily understand.
It seems a bit disingenuous that you gloss over the fact women earn a significantly unequal amount of degrees, while being concerned about precise equality in gender ratios.
This analysis is very interesting, but I think it's worth noting that there are various possible reasons why women are disproportionately in lower-paying positions among the White House staff. One of them, obviously, is continuing sexism in hiring practices. Another is women who take time off to care for children being kept in lower-paying positions because they have fewer years of experience than most men the same age.
A third possible reason, which I suspect is one of the more common sources of male/female inequality in the workplace, is discrimination against employees who want to work reasonable hours and take sick days so that they can be with their children. Employers who assume that employees who want to work shorter hours lack commitment to their jobs end up being sexist in effect, because women face social pressure to be the primary caregivers for their children.
A fourth possible reason is that the lack of women in senior positions may be an artifact of past sexism. Women in senior positions in most organizations are likely to be in their forties and fifties. Women in that age range faced a great deal more sexism in the education process and in hiring early in their careers than young women do now. Thus, probably fewer women than men were given the opportunities when they were younger that would have been necessary for them to qualify for senior White House positions now. It's worth noting that institutionalized sexism in the past affects what opportunities the women who experienced that sexism have now.
I agree. The last Democratic administration in which many served was Clinton, far back in the 90s. Fewer women were employed in the White House, as well as in the Departments of Defense and State. That means the senior (read: older) staff probably reflects that.
A twitter follower to my organization offered to write a guest blog post on this topic too. She came up with slightly different numbers. You can read about her methods and access her charts etc and read her conclusion here: http://blog-aauw.org/2009/07/08/pay-equity-in-the-obama-white-house/
Gist of it:
"...Last week, the White House released its Annual Report To Congress On White House Office Staff, a fascinating list of the 487 employees who work in the West Wing. Being the nerd that I am, I downloaded the CSV file and imported it into an Access database so that I could play with the data.
The resulting table included the employee’s name, status, salary, pay basis, and title. I went through the table and, to the best of my ability, added an “M” or “F” to denote the employee’s gender wherever possible. (I excluded 34 names from the data set as I could not determine their gender based on their first name alone or by doing a very quick Google search. I erred on the side of caution.)
Of the remaining employees, there were 229 men and 224 women. The men’s mean average salary was $84,728.37, while the women’s mean average salary was $78,816.99. This means that in the Obama White House women make $0.93 for every $1 men make, much higher than the national average. Not perfect, but progress, nonetheless..."
I saw this post as I was doing mine-- thanks for the info! AAUW is doing great work.
Her numbers are different because she excluded 34 people but included the detailees, whose salaries tend to be higher as they are borrowed from other federal agencies. The highest-paid employee in the WH is a detailee, a man who makes more than $190k.
(Also, 2 WH employees make $0.00, which slants the averages)
Good post, good information. Nice balance to pop culture discussions.
This is a great article, but it needs a bit more information. While women earn more degrees, we are less likely to earn them in hard sciences and mathematics, fields which earn more than liberal arts majors (like me). Is information available on how old the employees are, how long they have been in their specialty, what types of degrees they hold?