Female White House Workers Are Paid Eighteen Percent Less Than Men

Obama on equal pay: 'This is not just a women's issue, this is a …

www.breakingnews.com10/17/12

Obama on equal pay: 'This is not just a women's issue, this is a family issue, this is a middle class issue.' – Live video.

Prez touts fair pay, but records show women paid less in WH | The …

dailycaller.com10/17/12

While Obama made the empathetic case for his single mother and his belief in equal pay — pointing out that the first bill he signed as president was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act — he did not address reports this year that …

At Tuesday’s Hofstra University presidential debate, President Barack Obama and Republican nominee Mitt Romney dueled over the question of equal pay for women.

Obama said that he believed in equal pay for women and pointed out that the first bill he signed as president was the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.

He failed to mention however that his own White House pays women less than men!

“The first bill I signed was something called the Lily Ledbetter bill. And it’s named after this amazing woman who had been doing the same job as a man for years, found out that she was getting paid less, and the Supreme Court said that she couldn’t’t bring suit because she should have found about it earlier, whereas she had no way of finding out about it,” Obama said. “So we fixed that. And that’s an example of the kind of advocacy that we need, because women are increasingly the breadwinners in the family. This is not just a women’s issue, this is a family issue, this is a middle-class issue, and that’s why we’ve got to fight for it.

Fact Check

According to a report published by the Free Beacon in April, the 2011 annual report on White House staff revealed that the median annual salary for female White House employees is 18% less than male employees.

And back in 2008, Deroy Murdock noted that in Obama’s U.S. Senate office, women were paid less than men stating that while the average male staffer brought home $54,397, female staffers averaged $45,152.

* Deroy Murdock is a syndicated columnist for Scripps Howard Foundation.

The Romney Comeback

Romney detailed his professional history, saying that he’d recruited women into positions of power during his tenure as governor of Massachusetts.

And he further pointed out the economic suffering women have endured under Obama, including the loss of 580,000 jobs among women and 3.5 million women in poverty.

“What we can do to help young women and women of all ages is to have a strong economy, so strong that employers that are looking to find good employees and bringing them into their workforce and adapting to a flexible work schedule that gives women opportunities that they would otherwise not be able to afford".

Obama pressed Romney on the Lily Ledbetter Act, suggesting that earlier in the year, when asked about the legislation, that the former Massachusetts governor dodged the issue.

“In my health care bill, I said insurance companies need to provide contraceptive coverage to everybody who is insured. Because this is not just a health issue, it’s an economic issue for women. It makes a difference. This is money out of that family’s pocket. Gov. Romney not only opposed it, he suggested that in fact employers should be able to make the decision as to whether or not a woman gets contraception through her insurance coverage".

"That’s not the kind of advocacy that women need. When Gov. Romney says that we should eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood, there are millions of women all across the country, who rely on Planned Parenthood for, not just contraceptive care, they rely on it for mammograms, for cervical cancer screenings".

Following the debate, pro-life groups blasted out myriad statements disputing Obama’s assertion that Planned Parenthood provides mammograms.

Romney was not allotted time to respond fully to the president’s follow up, but in answering the next question he reiterated his stance on contraception.

“I’d just note that I don’t believe that bureaucrats in Washington should tell someone whether they can use contraceptives or not. And I don’t believe employers should tell someone whether they could have contraceptive care of not. Every woman in America should have access to contraceptives, and the president’s statement of my policy is completely and totally wrong.”