It’s tough to be a woman and work for President Obama.
In a profile on women working in the White House, The Washington Post‘s Juliet Eilperin writes that female staffers had to devise a sneaky strategy so their male colleagues would listen do them.
Female staffers adopted a meeting strategy they called ‘amplification’: When a woman made a key point, other women would repeat it, giving credit to its author. This forced the men in the room to recognize the contribution — and denied them the chance to claim the idea as their own.
‘We just started doing it, and made a purpose of doing it. It was an everyday thing,’ said one former Obama aide who requested anonymity to speak frankly. Obama noticed, she and others said, and began calling more often on women and junior aides.
Why would women who work for Obama, who continuously virtue signals on feminist pet issues like the so-called “wage gap,” need to repeat themselves in order to be heard? This is the same president who put forth new rules earlier this year that would force large companies to report salary data to make it easier for a government agency to go after businesses that do not pay their male and female employees equally.
It seems logical to assume a president who is so eager to punish everyone else for not creating a workspace that’s inclusive to women would do as much, but as it turns out, the White House may not be the feminist paradise it likes to pretend to be.
In 2014, The Washington Post reported the average man in the White House earned 13 percent more than the average woman did. The Post reported the wage disparity was due to the fact that most female employees held lower-level jobs that paid less, while men occupied more senior-level positions.
Two years later, women working for the president now earn even less than they did in 2014. The average man working for Obama’s White House earns 16 percent more than the average woman does, according to an analysis by The Washington Times.
President Obama should probably focus on making his own workspace friendlier to women before chiding everyone else about it, because this is just embarrassing.
