I recently posted a picture of the congressional vote count for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act showing the absolutely disgusting bi-partisan divide over this vote in 2009.  Republicans should be ashamed.

Credit: Rachel Maddow/MSNBC

However, someone added a link to an Examiner article posted a few days ago that said the Obama White House paid women 15% less in 2011.  The article essentially says that Obama is a massive hypocrite and Democrats are truly the ones waging the war against women.  If you read not very far into this story, they say the numbers are based on median salary, not the mean, and it's not classified by job title OR GS class (which would really get at equal pay for equal work - the whole point of the Ledbetter act!).  Unfortunately, when I went to grab the data from the White House page, it didn't list GS class or gender.  It'd be a lot more accurate to use GS class for this type of analysis because that takes into account the amount of experience a person has in each position, but doing the averages by job titles is still MUCH better than taking the median of the salaries.  In a profession such as US politics which is dominated by men, it's not surprising that a MEDIAN is going to be much higher for men than women. 

To do this extremely basic analysis, I took out any specialist job titles for which there was no other direct comparison.  I then went through all of the names and added a gender association (Had to plug a few into a baby name site, the Obama White House is pretty diverse!).  After that I found the Male and Female average wage for each job title and then calculated the wage skew by gender (just the percent difference, negative numbers mean that the number favors the female salary).  You can see the data below:

So if we take the raw average for each gender, women made 1% less in the Obama White House than men did.  If you remove the high paying jobs for which women don't hold a similar position, the skew is 4% in the favor of women.

Now, let's get this straight, I'm not arguing that there isn't a glass ceiling in Washington.  It's definitely a male dominated arena which women are just now beginning to break into.  This is even represented in table above by the high paying positions for which multiple men have jobs with no equally employed female counterpart.  However, I don't think taking the median salary for everyone in the White House staff and calculating a 15% wage skew is a fair assesment either. 

Download my excel file