Elizabeth Warren’s office hit with wage-gap spotlight: ‘Nearly 10% wider than the national average’

Data gleaned from public documents shows a gap between Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s rhetoric on equal pay and the financial reality within her own office.

Senate salary data for fiscal year 2016 on Mrs. Warren’s male and female full-time staffers reveals an office that pays women 71 cents for every dollar paid to male colleagues. National statistics by the Census Bureau tallied 79.6 percent last year.

The Washington Free Beacon also ran its figures based on average instead of median, which widened the gap to roughly $26,000, or about 31 percent. Only the salary of employees who worked a full year were factored into the website’s analysis.

Notable statistics include:

• The median annual earnings for women staffers was $52,750, compared with $73,750 for men.
• Only one woman earned a six-figure salary — $100,624.88.
• Five men earned more than Warren’s highest paid woman staffer in 2016.

Critics of wage gap rhetoric argue that most discrepancies between men and women are due to a failure to compare statistical “apples to apples.” Mrs. Warren’s past statements on the issue, however, do not convey to that train of thought.

While speaking in favor of the Paycheck Fairness Act in November 2015, for example, the senator said: “A lot of people say that ’I thought equal pay for equal work was already the law’ — what they don’t realize is that half of all women in America work in jobs where they can get fired, just for asking how much the guy down the hall was getting paid for working the same job. That has to stop.”

“The one thing that always gets me is that in 2015, I still have to get out and say that we believe in equal pay for equal work,” the senator said, Mother Jones reported Nov. 18, 2015. “It always gets a nice round of applause, but you really want to say holy guacamole, we can’t get this thing done?”

Mrs. Warren’s office did not respond to the Free Beacon’s inquiries regarding its gender pay gap.