Obama’s Diversity Problem
April 13, 2012 by Sam Rolley
If President Barack Obama were a Republican, recent media reports would likely have Democrats, equal rights activists and affirmative action proponents up in arms.
With an abundance of recent media controversy that paints conservatives as being racially insensitive and as having a “War on Women” complex that allegedly has them wanting all women at home “barefoot and pregnant,” two recent headlines about the President’s Administration are a bit ironic.
The first came in the form of a photograph that made its rounds on news sites and through the conservative blogosphere. The photo, taken from the Obama campaign’s Tumblr page, shows a gathering of members of the campaign team at its Chicago headquarters. Conservative pundits have pointed out that the “army of twenty-somethings” pictured in the photo isn’t an extremely racially diverse one.
The latest ironic Obama headline comes on the heels of the recent release of a number of White House financial records. The records show that women hold very few top-level positions on the White House staff and earn, on average, about $11,000 less every year than their male counterparts.
The median salary for women was $60,000, while the median salary for men was $71,000.
In a 2010 statement, Obama addressed the fact that women typically earn less in the workforce.
“Paycheck discrimination hurts families who lose out on badly needed income. And with so many families depending on women’s wages, it hurts the American economy as a whole. In difficult economic times like these, we simply cannot afford this discriminatory burden,” Obama said in 2010.
Obama’s behavior is not new. In 2008, it was discovered that women in McCain’s office were paid much better than the women in Obama’s.
–Bryan Nash contributed to this report.
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