Equal Pay for Women Doesn't Apply to Democrats

This Tuesday, the U.S. Senate is expected to take up debate on the  Paycheck Fairness Act, a measure intended to give women stronger remedies against wage discrimination.

According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau women earn only 77 cents for every dollar earned by a man. For women of color, the wage gap is even wider. Unfortunately for Democrats, who are pushing the measure against strong Republican opposition, the wage gap in their own offices does little to disabuse people of the idea that liberals are foremost concerned with how others live their lives, while ignoring their own shortcomings…

The Free Beacon used publicly available salary data from the transparency website Legistorm to calculate the figures, and considered only current full-time staff members who were employed for the entirety of fiscal year 2011.

The employee gender pay gap among Senate Democrats was not limited to Murray, Boxer, and Feinstein. Of the 50 members of the Senate Democratic caucus examined in the analysis, 37 senators paid their female staffers less than male staffers.

Some of the Senate's leading progressives had the largest gender pay gaps, with Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders leading the way by paying his male staffers 47.6 percent more than his female employees.

In fairness to Democrats, similar pay gaps exist among Republican senators and are most likely the result of hiring decisions — men are most likely to be employed as chiefs of staff, while women are more likely to be lower-paid administrative assistants and schedulers — and not due to discriminatory salaries among workers who do the same job. So rest easy, Democrats, you're only discriminatory in your hiring policies, not in individual pay scales!

This does complicate the narrative of a Republican "war on women." We should have been suspicious of that phrasing from the start — since when do Republicans go to war with anyone who doesn't have oil?

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Tags: Democrats, Men and Women, Republicans, Senate