During a segment on MSNBC Tuesday evening devoted to the question of whether Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) has engaged in sexist criticisms of Democratic presidential primary opponent Hillary Clinton, anchor Richard Wolffe played for his audience a Clinton campaign ad centered on the issue of "equal pay," underscoring how the former first lady is running on feminist themes to fire up female Democratic voters in New Hampshire and Iowa.
Nowhere in the segment, however, did Wolffe -- or his panelists feminist writer Amanda Marcotte and Democratic strategist Tara Dowdell -- note that there's evidence that Clinton, both as a senator and as secretary of state, paid her male staffers substantially more than her female ones.
As Ali Meyer of the Washington Free Beacon reported one week earlier:
Hillary Clinton’s State Department paid men $16,000 more on average in annual salary than women, according to data from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM).
An OPM database called FedScope contains data on more than 2 million federal civilian employees and includes information about employment, including gender, age, education level, and pay grade.
The data, which is organized by calendar year, shows that men were paid more than women in each year that Clinton was heading the department as secretary of state.
A similar analysis back in February by the Free Beacon's Brent Scher shows a similar pay gap when Clinton was a senator:
Hillary Clinton portrays herself as a champion of women in the workforce, but women working for her in the U.S. Senate were paid 72 cents for each dollar paid to men, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis of her Senate years’ salary data.
During those years, the median annual salary for a woman working in Clinton’s office was $15,708.38 less than the median salary for a man, according to the analysis of data compiled from official Senate expenditure reports.
The analysis compiled the annual salaries paid to staffers for an entire fiscal year of work from the years 2002 to 2008. Salaries of employees who were not part of Clinton’s office for a full fiscal year were not included. Because the Senate fiscal year extends from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, Clinton’s first year in the Senate, which began on Jan. 3, 2001, was also not included in the analysis.
The salaries speak for themselves. The data shows that women in her office were paid 72 cents for every dollar paid to men.
