For those who may have missed it, March is Women's History Month, and President Joe Biden is never one to let a chance to exploit identity to advance his policies pass by.
In a recent and especially egregious show of hypocrisy this week, Biden's official @POTUS Twitter account shared what looks to be a letter to the president from a young girl named Charlotte. It read (emphasis and errors from original):
"Dear Presitent Biden: I just wanted to tell something not fair to ladies. Men are getting more money then girls. I think you should fix this since your the presitent. Even I'm a child and I think we should do something."
Biden's official account shared the image of Charlotte's letter and said the president "couldn't agree more" with her. "Women lose thousands of dollars each year, and hundreds of thousands over a lifetime, because of gender and racial wage gaps," the president's tweet continued. "I'm committed to building an economy where my daughters have the same rights and opportunities as my sons," Biden's official account claimed.
The entirely unsurprising reality, however, is that President Biden did nothing to ensure pay for his female employees was on par with his male employees during his more than three decades in the United States Senate. Once again, the man who frequently reinforces his statements by giving his "word as a Biden" is easily proven to be as hypocritical as they come.
According to an analysis of Biden's Senate payrolls by our friends over at The Washington Free Beacon, Biden did not pay men and women equally at any point in his more than 35 years serving in the upper chamber. In terms of methodology, the Beacon reviewed "salary disbursements disclosed in the biannual report of the secretary of the Senate" and "only staffers employed for the entirety of any of the six-month pay periods analyzed were included in the calculations."
"When Biden joined the Senate in 1973, the average pay for a full-time female staffer in his office was $5,029, about 68 percent of the $7,383 average paid to men during that span, according to the secretary of the Senate's first spending report for the 93rd Congress," the Free Beacon reported of its findings. An analysis of Biden's full three-plus decades in the Senate "found that he never achieved gender pay equity" and "[o]ver the course of Biden's time in the Senate, women on average earned just 67 cents for each dollar earned by men."
What was that Biden claimed about his "commitment" to a fair economy?
When the Free Beacon dove into the salary reports, they found some years in which Biden's gender wage gap was even greater than the national average he points to now as a great iniquity and barely ever came close to reaching equal pay between his male and female staffers.
"Since Biden's first year in the Senate in 1973, the national gender pay gap has not fallen below 57 percent," the Free Beacon's analysis noted. "Biden paid women less than 67 cents on the dollar in 22 six-month periods."
In 11 of the six-month periods reviewed, "women working for Biden earned less than 50 percent of what men made." Biden came close to "achieving gender pay equity" in 2002 when his female aides "earned 98 percent of the amount collected by their male counterparts."
But from 1983 to 1984, Biden's female staff "garnered as little as 44 percent of what Biden's male employees made." The Free Beacon's analysis noted that the "disparity sat at 45 percent in early 1991, just months before Biden made Clarence Thomas's treatment of female workers the focus of Thomas's Supreme Court nomination hearings," showing again that Biden has been a hypocrite on the issue for decades.
Even in more recent years, Biden's last few months in the Senate in 2008 before becoming Obama's vice president saw his office's gender pay gap expand again, "as women in his office earned 66 percent as much as men—a gap 11 percentage points wide than the 2008 national average," the Free Beacon found.
So, on the issue of equal pay — much like most other issues Biden attempts to exploit to his political advantage — the president has nary a leg on which to stand.
