Do we need legislation to guarantee equal pay for women? | The Tylt

The 37 percent gender pay gap in President Trump's White House is more than double the 17 percent gender pay gap nationally. According to the Pew Research Center, the Trump White House gender gap is wider than the national gender pay gap stood in 1980.

The median female White House employee is drawing a salary of $72,650 in 2017, compared to the median male salary of $115,000. “The typical female staffer in Trump's White House earns 63.2 cents per $1 earned by a typical male staffer,” Perry writes.

The highest-paid staffers in the Trump White House are primarily male, with nearly 74 percent of the top 23 staffers being male. By contrast, in the Obama White House of 2015, only 52 percent of the highest-paid staffers were men.

Many women have advocated for equal pay legislation that would guarantee equal pay for equal work.

And many members of Congress agree.

But many say the pay gap is a myth—or if it exists, it isn't caused by gender discrimination.

Using the statistic that women make 78 cents on the dollar as evidence of rampant discrimination has been debunked over and over again. That statistic doesn’t take into account a lot of choices that women and men make—education, years of experience and hours worked—that influence earnings. If we want to have a fruitful discussion about a gender wage gap, we should have it after the comparison is adjusted for those factors.

Some research indicates the gap is due to women missing years in the workforce to bear and raise children.

When men and women finish school and start working, they’re paid pretty much equally. But a gender pay gap soon appears, and it grows significantly over the next two decades. So what changes?

The big reason that having children, and even marrying in the first place, hurts women’s pay relative to men’s is that the division of labor at home is still unequal, even when both spouses work full time. That’s especially true for college-educated women in high-earning occupations: Children are particularly damaging to their careers.

But others argue, whatever the reason for the pay gap, women shouldn't be penalized for having children, and the fact that minority women earn even less than men is a huge problem.