Subject: Re: Huffington Post (FactCheck.org): Data Debunks Claim That Hillary Clinton Paid Women Less Than Men
From: "Ann O'Leary" <[email-masked]>
To: Huma Abedin <[email-masked]>
Cc: Jesse Lehrich <[email-masked]>, hrcrapid <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 22 Apr 2015 17:17:10 -0700
List-Id: <hrcrapid.googlegroups.com>

Agree - this is great. Especially powerful that Norm Ornstein is on our
side!  Keep his assessment for future use!

On Wed, Apr 22, 2015 at 5:13 PM, Huma Abedin <[email-masked]>
wrote:

> This is awesome
>
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Apr 22, 2015, at 12:09 PM, Jesse Lehrich <[email-masked]>
> wrote:
>
>
> http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/22/hillary-clinton-gender-pay-gap_n_7117620.html?utm_hp_ref=tw
>
> Data Debunks Claim That Hillary Clinton Paid Women Less Than Men
>
> *The following post first appeared on FactCheck.org
> <http://factcheck.org/>.*
>
> The Republican National Committee chairman says Hillary Clinton paid women
> in her Senate office less than men. But annual salary data provided by the
> Clinton campaign show median salaries for men and women in Clinton’s office
> were virtually identical.
>
> What gives? The answer may be unsatisfying, but it boils down to
> methodology.
>
> RNC chairman Reince Priebus based his claim on a report
> <http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clintons-war-on-women/> by the*Washington
> Free Beacon* of publicly available expense reports submitted biannually
> to the secretary of the Senate. Looking at median salaries among full-time,
> year-round employees, the *Free Beacon* concluded that women working in
> Clinton’s Senate office were paid 72 cents for each dollar paid to men.
>
> Pushing back against that analysis, the Clinton campaign provided
> FactCheck.org a list of the names, titles and annual salaries of every
> full-time person employed in Clinton’s Senate office between 2002 and 2008.
> Those data show the median salary for men and women to be the same at
> $40,000. The data also show Clinton hired roughly twice as many women as
> men.
>
> The Clinton list of salaries included full-time workers who may have
> worked only part of the year, or who took brief unpaid leaves of absence.
> The *Free Beacon* list excluded anyone who did not work for an entire
> fiscal year. Left off the *Free Beacon* list, for example, was a male
> assistant to the chief of staff earning a salary of $35,000, because he
> took a two-week unpaid leave of absence to work on a House campaign.
>
> “There are many different ways to measure these things and you will get
> slightly different answers,” Eileen Patten, a research analyst at the Pew
> Research Center told us in a phone interview. “It’s not that either data
> set is flawed. They just show different things.”
>
> American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, who regularly sifts
> through disbursement reports from the secretary of the Senate while doing
> research for the annual Vital Statistics on Congress report
> <http://www.brookings.edu/research/reports/2013/07/vital-statistics-congress-mann-ornstein>,
> said the data are difficult to use to track salaries because Senate
> staffers often toggle between Senate and campaign work. That churn was
> particularly true on Clinton’s staff, he said, because she was running for
> president in 2007 and 2008. For that reason, he believes the Clinton
> campaign methodology provides a more accurate measure of her record on pay
> equity.
>
> We take no position on which may be the superior methodology — as Patten
> told us, both have benefits and tradeoffs. But we think it’s instructive to
> consider those benefits and tradeoffs.
>
> Pay in Clinton’s Senate office figures to be an issue because Clinton has
> made pay inequality, and gender discrimination, a focus of her campaign for
> president.
>
> *Priebus’ Attack*
>
> On the day Clinton formally announced her candidacy for president, Priebus
> went on CBS’ “Face the Nation
> <http://www.cbsnews.com/news/face-the-nation-transcripts-april-12-2015-kerry-paul-priebus/>”
> and attacked Clinton on one of her signature causes — equal pay for women —
> claiming that she paid women in her office less than men.
>
> “[She] can’t have it both ways,” Priebus said. “She can’t pay women less
> in her Senate office and claim that she is for equal pay.”
>
> “We don’t know she did that,” host Bob Schieffer interrupted.
>
> Said Priebus: “Well, the facts don’t bear that out, the facts show that
> she didn’t pay women an equal amount of money in her Senate office.”
>
> As we said, Priebus’ claim is based on an analysis
> <http://freebeacon.com/politics/hillary-clintons-war-on-women/> by the *Washington
> Free Beacon,*which concluded that women in Clinton’s Senate office were
> paid 72 cents for each dollar paid to men. Using publicly available
> disbursement reports, the *Free Beacon*based its conclusion on the median
> salary for men and women — regardless of position — among employees who
> worked full-time for an entire fiscal year from 2002 to 2008.
>
> “Salaries of employees who were not part of Clinton’s office for a full
> fiscal year were not included,” the *Free Beacon* report states.
>
> Using that methodology, the *Free Beacon* found the median annual salary
> for women working in Clinton’s office was $40,791, and it was $56,500 for
> men. The *Free Beacon*reporter who prepared the report, Brent Scher,
> declined to provide us with the raw data from his analysis to compare with
> the data from the Clinton campaign. But he said the *Free Beacon* stands
> by its report and its methodology, and his methodology was transparent
> enough to see how he arrived at his numbers.
>
> The Clinton campaign doesn’t dispute the accuracy of the *Free Beacon* data,
> but it argues the data and methodology lead to a misleading conclusion.
>
> “The Free Beacon based their analysis off an incomplete, and therefore
> inaccurate set of numbers,” said Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton
> campaign. “The fact is, Hillary paid full-time men and women equally.”
>
> Schwerin provided FactCheck.org a list of the name, gender, title and
> annual salary of every full-time person employed in Clinton’s Senate office
> between 2002 and 2008. Notably, the Clinton campaign’s figures show the
> annual salaries of employees regardless of how long they worked in any
> given year. So if a woman was hired at an annual salary of $50,000 but only
> worked part of the year (and therefore earned some fraction of that
> $50,000), the Clinton data would include that salary in the women’s salary
> column. The *Free Beacon* report would not have included that employee at
> all. The Clinton campaign data also include employees who may have taken a
> brief leave of absence (sometimes to work for Clinton’s 2008 presidential
> campaign). Because they did not work the entire fiscal year, they were not
> included in the *Free Beacon*report.
>
> Taking out Hillary Clinton’s salary — we didn’t think it was fair to
> include her since she didn’t hire herself — the median annual salary for
> both men and women, regardless of how much of the year they worked, was
> identical: $40,000.
>
> (We spot checked dozens of the salaries provided by the Clinton campaign
> against the expense reports filed with the secretary of the Senate. Direct
> comparisons were not possible because the Clinton salary data was based on
> calendar years, while the public disbursement records are based on fiscal
> years. The annual salary numbers also do not take into consideration any
> bonuses an employee might have earned. But pro-rated for the amount of the
> year worked by the employee, the figures we checked generally matched up.)
>
> *The 77-Cent Figure*
>
> The *Free Beacon* notes that its methodology more closely mirrors the
> methodology used by the Census Bureau
> <http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/income_wealth/cb11-157.html> to
> arrive at the oft-cited statistic that women earn 77 cents for every dollar
> earned by men in the U.S. Like the *Free Beacon*, the Census Bureau only
> considered full time, year-round employees. And so, the *Free Beacon* argues,
> Clinton leaves herself vulnerable to this kind of attack because she has,
> in the past, repeatedly cited that same 77-cent figure.
>
> For example, on Clinton’s Senate Web page
> <http://web.archive.org/web/20090112063015/http://clinton.senate.gov/issues/women/> just
> before she left the Senate (accessed via the Internet Archive Wayback
> Machine), it stated, “More than forty years after the Equal Pay Act was
> signed into law by President Kennedy, women still earn only $.76 cents for
> every dollar men earn for doing the same work.”
>
> More recently, Clinton tweeted this
> <https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/453688842621431808> last year:
>
> *@HillaryClinton, April 8, 2014*: 20 years ago, women made 72 cents on
> the dollar to men. Today it’s still just 77 cents. More work to do.
> #EqualPay #NoCeilings
>
> We at FactCheck.org have been critical
> <http://www.factcheck.org/2012/06/obamas-77-cent-exaggeration/> of this
> statistic in the past when it is portrayed as the pay disparity “for doing
> the same work.” That’s not what it represents.
>
> As we noted when Obama cited the statistic in a campaign ad, the Census
> Bureau figure is the median (midpoint) for all women in all jobs, not for
> women doing “the same work” or even necessarily working the same number of
> hours as men. In fact, women on average work fewer hours than men and are
> generally under-represented in jobs that pay more. In other words, it is
> inaccurate to blame the entirety of that wage gap on discrimination against
> women doing the same jobs as men for the same number of hours. Furthermore,
> the raw gap for all women is not quite as large when looking at weekly
> earnings rather than yearly earnings.
>
> The Pew Research Center, for example, did estimates based on hourly
> earnings of both full- and part-time workers and found
> <http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/14/on-equal-pay-day-everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-gender-pay-gap/> that
> women earn 84 percent of what men earn. Why? According to Pew’s surveys,
> women were more likely to take career interruptions to care for their
> family, which can hurt long-term earnings. In addition, Pew noted, “women
> as a whole continue to work in lower-paying occupations than men do.” And
> last, Pew noted “some part of the pay gap may also be due to gender
> discrimination.” Women were nearly twice as likely as men to report that
> they had been discriminated against at work because of their gender.
>
> In a recent speech <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vGhHC45c46Q> at the
> United Nations Conference on Women on March 10, Clinton did not cite the
> 77-cent figure, and she noted that in addition to fighting for equal pay
> for equal work, closing the pay gap will require “encouraging more women to
> pursue [higher-paying] careers in science, technology, engineering or
> mathematics” (about the 11:35 mark).
>
> But the Clinton campaign isn’t arguing that the *Free Beacon* report is
> skewed because it is not a comparison of similar-level positions. It says
> the data show there was no pay disparity in Clinton’s office when looking
> at the median salaries of men and women*regardless* of job title. For
> that reason, we would caution that neither methodology — neither the *Free
> Beacon*‘s nor the Clinton campaign’s — purports to compare the salaries
> of men and women who were doing the *same jobs*.
>
> Using the salary data supplied by the Clinton campaign, we looked at
> median and average salaries for men and women in Clinton’s office year by
> year and found relatively minor differences. In five out of the seven
> years, the median salaries were slightly lower for women without Clinton’s
> salary included. But when all the years were combined, the median salary
> was $40,000 for both groups. The average salary — again, taking out
> Clinton’s salary — was nearly identical, $50,398 for men and $49,336 for
> women. And again, Clinton hired nearly twice as many women as men.
>
> So what accounts for the difference between the two sets of findings? Is
> it just because one includes employees who worked only part of the year (or
> had a leave of absence)? The example of 2008 is instructive.
>
> According to the 2008 salaries provided by the Clinton campaign — which,
> again, includes anyone who even worked part of the year – the median salary
> for women was $39,500, while the median for men was $43,000. That works out
> roughly to women making 92 cents for every dollar earned by men. (In other
> years, it was the opposite — but as we noted earlier, the median for all
> seven years combined showed median salaries to be the same.)
>
> We then compared the annual salary data provided by the Clinton campaign
> with disbursement data available from the secretary of the Senate for
> fiscal year 2008 (Oct. 1, 2007, to Sept. 30, 2008). That doesn’t perfectly
> match up with the Clinton campaign’s calendar year figures, but it’s close.
>
> Of the 44 women listed in the annual salary data provided by the campaign,
> 26 of them worked only a portion of the year. And 10 of 24 men worked only
> part of the year. That means they either started or ended their employment
> sometime during the fiscal year, or, as was often the case, they took
> unpaid leaves of absence at some point during the fiscal year. Those would
> be the people not included in the *Free Beacon*analysis. If those
> part-year employees are excluded, the median gap widened to $42,500 for
> women and $59,000 for men. That translates to women earning just 72 cents
> for every dollar earned by men.
>
> In other words, the Clinton campaign has a good point: Not counting those
> who worked only part of the year results in a wider pay gap for women in
> Clinton’s office.
>
> A comparison of both data sets shows that those who only worked part of
> the year represent a little over half of the men and women who worked in
> Clinton’s Senate office that year. Among those who only worked part of the
> fiscal year, and would not have counted in the *Free Beacon* analysis,
> the average and median salaries were higher for women. The median annual
> salary for women who worked only part of the year was $38,000, compared
> with $35,000 for men, our analysis of the Clinton salary database showed.
> The Clinton campaign argues that including those who only worked part of
> the year makes more sense, because it shows that women and men were offered
> comparable salaries.
>
> *Some Examples*
>
> The Clinton campaign also argues that any analysis ought to consider the
> salaries paid to Senate staffers who also worked for any of Clinton’s three
> political entities: Hill PAC, Friends of Hillary or Hillary Clinton for
> President. Often, employees were splitting their time between the Senate
> and political entities and earning significant salaries from those campaign
> entities, sometimes more than their work for the Senate office.
>
> For example, Huma Abedin, Clinton’s longtime assistant/senior adviser, was
> making a modest salary in Clinton’s Senate office ($14,000 in 2002 to
> $20,000 a year in 2008), but in the latter years of that time period, she
> was making significantly more money working for Clinton’s political
> entities (Friends of Hillary, Hill PAC and then the presidential campaign
> beginning in 2007). Public records filed with the Federal Election
> Commission <http://www.fec.gov/> show in 2008 that she was paid a total
> of nearly $97,000 in wages from Friends of Hillary, Hill PAC and Hillary
> Clinton for President.
>
> Another employee, Sarah Gegenheimer, was being paid a $20,000 salary as
> deputy communications director for Clinton’s Senate office in 2007, but she
> was also making $40,000 a year in the communications office of the
> Democratic Leadership Offices — Office of Senate Majority Leader and Office
> of the Democratic Whip, the Clinton campaign says. In addition, FEC records
> show she was paid another $24,000 in wages for work provided to Hillary
> Clinton for President and Friends of Hillary.
>
> In other words, both of those employees would have been counted in the *Free
> Beacon*tally, and both were paid less than the median in Clinton’s Senate
> office, even though their combined salaries were much higher than the
> median.
>
> On the other hand, Dan Schwerin, a system administrator/assistant to the
> chief of staff, was not counted in the *Free Beacon* report, Scher said,
> because disbursement records show he was not on the payroll from Nov. 2 to
> Nov. 15, 2007 — even though his salary for the first half of the fiscal
> year was $15,349 and $20,333 for the second. The Clinton campaign said
> Schwerin took a brief unpaid leave of absence to help out on a House
> campaign.
>
> Ornstein said this kind of movement is typical in Senate offices,
> particularly if the senator is running for reelection or higher office.
> Some full-time employees are permanently on the payroll year to year, but
> others bounce back and forth. The better way to make pay comparisons, he
> said, would be to look at the annual salaries adjusted for the amount of
> the year someone worked.
>
> “You have to try to compare apples to apples and that is difficult to do,
> but there is more sense in the way the Clinton people said to do this,”
> Ornstein said.
>
> LegiStorm, a nonpartisan group that tracks congressional salaries, warns
> on its website that the disbursement figures in the reports filed with the
> secretary of the Senate do not represent annual salary figures. On its FAQ
> page
> <http://www.legistorm.com/salaries/faq.html#My_member_of_Congress_s_chief_of_staff_seems_to_be_making_only_a_few_thousand_dollars_each_quarter_How_can_that_be_>,
> LegiStorm explains, “Because of fluctuations associated with things like
> holiday bonuses or leaves of absence to work on political campaigns, annual
> salaries must be calculated with great caution. Some staffers receive
> additional non-taxpayer-paid income for political work they perform in
> their free time.”
>
> According to the Hatch Act, federal employees like those in Clinton’s
> Senate office are prohibited from engaging in partisan political activities
> while they are working on government time. However, as the Congressional
> Research Service <http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/R43630.pdf> explains, the
> law allows “most federal employees to engage in a wide range of voluntary,
> partisan political activities on their own off-duty time and away from the
> federal workplace.” Indeed, as the *New York Times
> <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/03/17/nyregion/ex-aides-to-torricelli-testify-about-pay-for-campaign-work.html> *noted
> in 2001, “Virtually every member of Congress enlists government employees
> to do some campaign work.”
>
> As the data show, heavy turnover in the office together with movement
> between Senate and campaign staffs can make a big difference when comparing
> salaries in Clinton’s Senate office.
>
> --
> Jesse Lehrich
> Rapid Response
> Hillary For America
> 781-307-2254
> @JesseLehrich
>
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