Snopes says Sorta True - Mixed
Elizabeth Warren Pays Female Staffers Less Than Their Male Counterparts?
Personally, I call this a LIE. This is beyond spin.
However, the implied claim that Warren pays women less than men for equivalent work is flawed because the
Free Beacon report didn’t account for differing pay among job titles — in other words, it was an apples-to-oranges comparison that didn’t actually compare the pay of workers of both genders who perform
equivalent job duties. The report also only used salary data for staffers who worked in Warren’s office for the full 2016 fiscal year (which spanned parts of 2015 and 2016), a selective and arbitrary timeframe that eliminated the most obvious comparison available.
In regards to the latter point, we note that Mindy Myers, a woman, and Daniel Geldon, a man, held the same position as Warren’s chief of staff consecutively. As Chief of Staff in 2015, Myers earned $164,458, and when she
left at the end of the year (and later accepted a position as executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee), she was replaced by Geldon, whose salary is the same as hers was, according to salary data from the Secretary of the Senate. The
Free Beacon excluded Myers and Geldon from their analysis on the basis that neither worked for Warren throughout the full 2015-2016 fiscal year and therefore didn’t note that the two were paid equally for holding the same job position.
As to the former point, Brad Fitch, chief executive officer at the Congressional Management Foundation (a nonprofit dedicated to improving operations in Congress and citizen engagement with lawmakers), noted that in order to fairly assess gender pay parity, researchers must take into account variables such as experience and education levels, as well as staff turnover and the reality that people with different job titles earn different salaries — factors not considered in the
Free Beacon‘s analysis:
The methodology used in the analysis is flawed; they combined positions and people at different levels in the office. It’s the equivalent of comparing a female astronaut to a male welder to conclude some people get paid more than others. If you compare a staff assistant to a chief of staff, it’s not a fair comparison.