by Catherine Smith
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden paid his female staffers less on average than male staffers over several decades, new analysis finds.
Biden has bemoaned gender disparities in wages and has campaigned for the presidency as someone who’s “fought for women’s rights his whole career,” pointing to gender equity legislation signed during the Obama administration. This is at odds after reports covering Biden’s full Senate tenure found that he never achieved gender pay equity. “Over the course of Biden’s 35 years in the U.S. Senate, women on average earned just 67 cents for each dollar earned by men.” In some years, the pay for women dropped to less than half that of men. Biden never achieved pay equity in those years and paid women less than 50 percent of what men were paid at certain points, The Washington Free Beacon reported Wednesday.
Washington Free Beacon found those figures by analyzing data from the biannual report of the secretary of the Senate, which covers six-month periods. Staff not employed for the entirety of those periods weren’t included in the analysis.
The Beacon’s report came as Biden fought to maintain his front-runner status in the 2020 race, where issues surfaced surrounding his long tenure of public service.
Biden has long advocated for equal pay and in June called out the pay gap between the U.S. women’s and men’s soccer teams.
“In 2019, it’s past time we close the pay gap and ensure women get paid as much as men,” he said at the time.
According to the Free Beacon, Biden came close to achieving pay equality in 2002 but the gap widened in 2008.
The Beacon’s Collin Anderson reported: “Women garnered as little as 44 percent of what Biden’s male employees made in 1983 and 1984 … During Biden’s final months as a senator in 2008, the gender pay gap again widened, as women in his office earned 66 percent as much as men — a gap 11 percentage points wider than the 2008 national average, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity.”
According to another analysis, the White House paid women less when Biden served under former President Obama’s administration.
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Catherine Smith is a newcomer to Washington D.C. She met, and married an American journalist and moved to D.C from the U.K. She graduated with a B.A in Graphic, Media and Communications and worked in design and retail in the U.K.
Photo “Joe Biden” by Gage Skidmore. CC BY-SA 2.0.
