“To avoid addressing structural and institutional gender discrimination in terms of pay equity, the go-to is to talk about position and title when, in fact, that’s not what’s driving pay inequity,” said C. Nicole Mason, the president and CEO of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “It’s decisions that are being made from the top down about the valuing of women’s work and how much they should be paid.”
The issue of pay inequity has plagued past administrations too. Women in President Barack Obama’s White House were paid between about 84 and 89 cents for every $1 paid to male staffers, though that gap was narrower than the one in the Trump White House and narrower, too, than the national gender pay gap in those years.
The gender pay gap widened from 89 cents on the dollar in 2016 during the final year Obama was in office, to 63 cents on the dollar the first year Trump was in office, according to an analysis by the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank.
