I just posted a list I found of all the 2012 WH staff salaries. You'll see it if you reload the OP. I'm going to provide her with it along with a comment that the list doesn't contain pay grade or tenure. And at 18%, it's still better than the 23% when Bush was in there (I have to find a link for verification of that though).

I know. I was one, for 20+ years. Jobs come with grades, and tenure increases the 'steps' within the grades.

Not everyone in the WH has the same job.
And an 18% differential is smaller than the national average.

"It is hugely important to note that this figure does not represent women being paid less for doing the same job as a male employee. The White House is not engaging in discriminatory behavior when it comes to providing equal pay to women who are doing the same job as a male counterpart."

The whole article is here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/rickungar/2012/10/18/white-house-record-on-women-should-be-better/

government, not by the guy who lives in the White House. Here's the list of employees who, by the way, are paid based upon their job titles/positions:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/21stcenturygov/tools/salaries

Hi, new member here.

I'm one of those people who likes to kick the tires for myself, get my hands dirty in the data. I heard this 18% thing on twitter and thought I would check it out for myself. I know the figure was based on 2011 White House staff data, so I downloaded that from whitehouse.gov, but because the 2012 data is also available, I downloaded that as well.

Bottom line: I cannot reproduce the 18% number.

Which I believe was based on median salaries, not on averages.

According to my own calculations, the median salary for all women employees at the White House was 12.1% less than for men in 2011, and 12.0% less in 2012.

The average salary was 9.6% less for women in 2011, 9.8% less in 2012.

This is because women are over-represented at the lower salary levels, and under-represented at the higher salary level.

As some other posters have commented, it's unlikely that we have an "unequal pay for same work" situation here. What we have is a systemic preference for hiring men in higher paying jobs.

Trust me, I studied probability and statistics in college, and the probability that the hiring patterns at the White House are gender-blind is just about zero. And there's really no excuse for that. Maybe somebody should have given President Obama a binder full of women

That's the bad news. I guess the good news is, the 18% number doesn't hold water. I'm astonished that nobody, not even motivated Democrats, bothered to fact check it. I looked and looked for any factual basis for that number and could not find it. I find a few sources linking to a site that won't load, and that's it.

And, more "good" news: comparatively speaking, while this is a discriminatory White House, it's a less discriminatory White House than previous ones.

After searching and searching, I can find only one source for this 18% data point, a guy named Andrew Stiles at a conservative paper called the Free Beacon in DC. Everybody else seems to be quoting him without checking his calculations. Even Democrats.

He said he used the median salary for men and women from 2011 (the latest year available to him when he did his analysis). But he somehow came up with a median salary of $60K for women, and $71K for men when in fact by my calculations the median salary for women was $64,056 and for men it was $72,876.

He says in his article that the White House doesn't say what sex the staffers are (which is true), but they do release the names, and so it's fairly easy to tell whether a staffer is male or female. I went through the same thing he did, assigning M or F to each name, and I googled their names when I was unsure (Kerry? Jordan?). In all but two cases was able to find out whether it was a male or a female. So I'm assuming he got the genders right, because that was fairly easy.

Anyway, not only were his median salaries wrong, but he made a very basic math mistake. He calculated 71/60 = 118.3%. From this he could have said that male staffers are paid 18% more than female staffers. But he flipped it. He said female staffers are paid 18% less than male staffers. And you can't flip that number like that. It's bad math. If you want to compare female staffers salaries to males, you have to take 1 - (60/71) which shows that female staffers are paid 15.5% less than male staffers.

But that number is still wrong, because 60 is not the median for women, and 71 is not the median for men, unless he was looking at some weird subset of the data. And even then, I just don't see it.

But his basic point was correct - women in the White House are paid less than men. Not less as in "less pay for the same work" but less as in "they get hired for lower paying jobs."

BTW I ran a simulation to calculate the odds that the pay pattern in the White House is gender blind. Result? 99% probability that gender was a factor in hiring at different levels of pay. And, that ignores the fact that there were three more men than women on the staff in 2011, when there are slightly more women in the population, and more women graduating college.

So, while you might be able to refute the 18% figure, and refute the "lower pay for same work" argument, you can't refute that gender discrimination is alive and well in the White House.

If I had more time, I'd love to dissect the info so I could go at them with everything I've got. Unfortunately even if you took these people through the basic math on a chalkboard, they wouldn't believe or understand it. It's beyond frustrating!

In another argument re: healthcare, I presented this particular person with a link to an easy-to-follow interactive page describing the healthcare bill plus a link to the entire bill online. She didn't look at either, but kept spouting her repub talking points. She bitched at me again last week, and I just told her I gave her the link to the full text in the last post -- read the freaking bill if she cared to continue discussing the ACA.