New salary data shows that female congressional staffers earn an average of $2,200 less a year than their male counterparts, with the biggest pay disparity being reported among Senate Republicans.
According to salary data for the pay period from October 2020 to March 2021 provided by the nonpartisan research company LegiStorm, women working in local and Washington, D.C., offices for members for the House and Senate earn an average salary of $57,308 a year, compared to $59,525 yearly for men, reports Fox News.
The current overall wage gap of 96% is slightly worse than last year's and a dropoff from 2016, when the benchmark was 98% and the Capitol Hill wall disparity rates nearly closed.
The differences in salary are happening even though a record number of women were elected to the House and Senate in 2020, and with women accounting for 27% of the members of Congress.
The widest gap was among Republican staffers, the data shows. The average female GOP staffer earned $62,472 for the pay period from October 2020 to March 2021, compared to the male salary of $66,766, marking a 94% pay gap that was the largest on the hill
Meanwhile, the largest pay gaps between male and female salaries came from the offices of:
- Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala.: 23 female staffers making on average 67% of the average wage of his 15 male employees.
- Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn.: 14 women earning 68% of what the 26 men earned.
- Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska: 26 females making 70% of the salaries the 15 men earned.
- Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan.: 17 women earning 71% of the average salary of the 21 men.
- Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho: 22 females making 72% of the salary the 16 men earned.
Tuberville's office, though, said the data isn't showing the full picture of how his office has been set up as a place "where young women could have career growth opportunities."
"Over 60% of Sen. Tuberville’s staff are women, with both the state staff and D.C. staff having more female than male staffers," a Tuberville spokeswoman told Fox News. "The senior staff is equally divided, three and three, between male and female staffers."
She also said that the office rejects "any application of the data that suggests female staff are paid inequitably or any differently than similarly situated male staff. That is simply not the case."
The data does reflect salaries for staffers for newly elected members of Congress as well as already-established offices, Fox News pointed out.
Meanwhile, Judd Deere, a spokesman for Hagerty's office, said the freshman lawmaker values his "incredible team full of exceptional, diverse talent and expertise who go above and beyond every day to represent and fight for the people of Tennessee."
Meanwhile, women working for House Democrats had an almost nonexistent pay gap, earning 99.7% of what their male counterparts made. According to the data report, the average salary for women working for Democrats was $56,709, compared to $56,909 for men.
The data also showed that more women than men work for congressional offices in the nation's capital and around the country. Almost 5,800 women were on the payroll, compared to almost 4,900 men.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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