Despite Hillary Clinton’s constant demands for equal pay for women, a member of her staff privately wondered if the campaign had “a pay equity problem.”
Ann O’Leary, Clinton’s senior policy adviser, was sent a tweet from then-presidential candidate Carly Fiorina, who was hitting the Democratic candidate on equal pay. Fiorina had linked to an article in the Washington Free Beacon about how her campaign paid women more than men, while Clinton’s campaign paid women less.
“We are going to keep getting hit on this one … unless we can more strongly rebut it,” O’Leary wrote in an Aug. 26, 2015, email. “Can we have an independent analysis showing that we have pay equity between men and women on the campaign? Do we have a pay equity problem?”
The email was illegally obtained by WikiLeaks and released Friday, and is not the first time Team Clinton worried about the candidate’s pay equity.
In February 2015, one day after the Free Beacon published an article about Clinton paying women less than men in her Senate office, Democratic operative Ian Mandel emailed other staffers research pertaining to the gender pay gap at the Clinton Foundation.
“Guys — Given the story yesterday about pay equity at the State Department, I wanted to flag something that came out of our research on pay equity at the Foundation,” Mandel wrote. “There are huge discrepancies, and it wouldn’t surprise me if [the Free Beacon] went here next.”
That research showed that just three out of 11 of the highest-paid staffers at the foundation were women. It also found the highest-paid male staffer made, on average, $294,157.50, while the highest-paid female staffer made, on average, $181,576.66 — a difference of $112,000.
In addition, the research found the median salary of the highest-paid men to be $346,106, and the median salary of the highest-paid women to be just $184,386 — a $190,000 difference.
Top Clinton aide Cheryl Mills had directed Mandel to do the research, emails showed.
Then in April 2015, the Clinton campaign thought they had a hold on the situation with an article from FactCheck.org that appeared to debunk the Free Beacon report about pay equity in Clinton’s Senate office. The article explained that the Free Beacon report only looked at staffers who worked for a full year.
The Clinton campaign sent FactCheck additional salary data (the Free Beacon report was based on publicly available documents) that showed the median salary of men and women to be equal.
“There are many different ways to measure these things and you will get slightly different answers,” Pew Research analyst Eileen Patten told FactCheck. “It’s not that either data set is flawed. They just show different things.”
To further blunt the pain for Clinton, FactCheck explained away the discrepancy found in the Free Beacon report using the same explanations for why the oft-cited claim that women are paid less than men in America is misleading in the first place.
For example, FactCheck noted that many women in Clinton’s office only worked part of the year, whether it was due to them being hired from or to another place, or if they took an unpaid leave of absence, of if they worked part-time.
The article, which the Clinton campaign worked on with FactCheck, was forwarded to members of Clinton’s staff. Senior Clinton aide Huma Abedin replied to the email containing the article with, “This is awesome.”
O’Leary called the article “great.”
The Free Beacon has been analyzing each of Clinton’s post-first lady jobs to see if her rhetoric about equal pay lines up with her practice. Another report from the outlet found that women earned less than men in Clinton’s State Department as well.
In every speech Clinton gives, she mentions equal pay, yet when it comes to her own offices, she doesn’t practice what she preaches. Is she discriminating against women? Hardly — there are many innocent explanations for the pay gaps in her office, and those same explanations apply to the gender gap at large.
But Clinton says she will fix the pay gap and implies that women are being discriminated against. This is not the case, and she cannot keep erroneously claiming that while simultaneously defending her own gender gap practices.
Ashe Schow is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
