US Equal Pay

From USA Today:
"Obama to start push to narrow gender wage gap"

President Obama heads to Orlando on Thursday to kick off a multi-city push by the White House to highlight economic issues facing women. Ahead of the Orlando visit, the White House announced that senior administration officials will also visit Boston, Chicago, Denver, New York and San Francisco in the coming months as part of the White House effort to put the spotlight on several issues that have particular resonance with women — including raising the minimum wage, narrowing the pay disparity between men and women, and increasing the availability of affordable child care as well as early education programs. In addition, the Small Business Administration and the National Women's Business Council is hosting a roundtable called STEM for Her in Washington next week with business leaders, academics and other stakeholders to discuss what can be done to encourage more women to seek careers in science, technology, engineering and math — fields where women have been unrepresented in the past. The push by Obama and his aides on the issue will culminate with the White House Summit on Working Families on June 23 in Washington, where administration officials say the hope is to come up with some concrete plans — whether through legislation or executive action — to help even the playing field for women in the workforce. "We want the summit to be very result-oriented," said White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett. "Our goal is over the course of the next three months to really explore those best practices that can determine whether we need acts of Congress, whether there's partnerships we can form with state and local government, with community colleges, with public school systems throughout the country." Last week, the White House Council of Economic Advisers released a report noting that, while women have made gains in the workforce and education attainment, a gender wage gap persists. On average, full-time, year-round female workers earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts, the report notes. The conservative American Enterprise Institute has noted that the White House is not immune to the problem of pay disparity. According to AEI's analysis of salary data from the "2013 Annual Report to Congress on White House Staff," the 229 female employees in the Obama White House are being paid a median annual salary of $65,000, compared with a median annual salary of nearly $74000 for the 232 male White House staffers  The gap continues even as women are likely to be more educated than their male peers. In 2013, 25- to 34-year-old women were 21% more likely than men of the same age to be college graduates. Obama has been using the gender wage gap to make his case for raising the federal minimum wage, a push that faces stiff headwinds in the GOP-controlled House. The White House contends that raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour by the end of 2016 would reduce the gender wage gap by nearly 5%. With American working women accounting for 45% of family earnings, the wage gap can't properly be described as a women's issue, suggested Betsey Stevenson, a member of the Council of Economic Advisers. "There ability to earn a fair and equal wage is a family issue, not a women's issue," Stevenson said.

^ It is a sad fact that in the world's only Super Power left in the 2nd decade of the 21st Century women continue to make far less than men for the same position. ^

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/03/20/obama-women-economics-wage-gap/6626793/