Hillary Unable to Hire Competent Women

Maybe she needs to borrow Mitt's binders full of women: Hillary Clinton spox responds to wage gap in her Senate office. Or maybe all the competent women are conservative?

During her nearly two terms as a U.S. senator, the median salary for women in Hillary Clinton's office was much less than the median salary for men.

As first reported by the Washington Free Beacon's Brent Scher, women in Clinton's office earned 72 cents to the dollar that men earned. That's even less than the oft-cited (and highly misleading) 77-cent figure for all working women in the United States.

The suggestion that Clinton was somehow discriminating against women is "a ridiculous proposition," says the presumed 2016 presidential candidate's spokesman Nick Merrill.

"A majority of her Senate staff were women," Merrill told the Washington Examiner in an e-mail. "Women held most of the senior-most positions — including her Chief of Staff. Four of the five highest paid positions in her office were held by women."

Apparently the majority of women that she chose to hire were worth less than the minority of men? How did that happen?

Merrill's explanation for Clinton's own wage gap strikes at the heart of problem with the wage gap in general. Even in this liberal female-led workplace that prides itself for putting women in top positions,it always ends up looking like women make far less, based on an analysis using the exact same metrics used in the America Association of University Women study that is the source of the infamous wage gap myth.

For Clinton, the excuse for women making 72 cents on a man's dollar number was that, despite the lower median salary, women held high positions in the office. When the White House had its own wage gap problem, the explanation was that men held higher-paying positions than women, but that when men and women held the same jobs, they were paid the same.

But such explanations also help explain away the blanket statistic that women earn 77 cents to the dollar that men earn, since it doesn't take into account any of these possible explanations. And so even though the number is often used to claim women are discriminated against in the workplace, the reality is that the gap is almost entirely due to the different choices men and women tend to make about their careers.

By the way, I'm starting to really appreciate Ashe Schow, the author of the article, who has been a strong voice for sensible feminism from the Wasington Examiner. And it does help that she's a young women, kind of cute, and seems to have a good sense of humor, as witness this picture of her courtesy of Wombat-socho:

Ashe Schow of the Washington Examiner
cosplaying as Zatanna Zatara.