Hannity Pushes Falsehood About Clinton Gender Pay Gap

Written by Kate Sarna

Published

Sean Hannity falsely claimed that Hillary Clinton's campaign admitted to paying female staffers less than male staffers while she was a senator, when in fact the opposite was true. Clinton's campaign reported that she paid men and women equally.

On the April 22 edition of his radio show, Hannity said that the Clinton campaign had “confirmed the accuracy” of a report from the conservative Free Beacon that Clinton had paid female staffers less than male staffers in her senate office:

HANNITY: There is another story I wanted to bring up about Hillary, and her campaign confirmed the accuracy of which to the Washington Free Beacon -- an analysis that showed that women working in Clinton's senate office were paid 72 cents for each dollar paid to men. The campaign told FactCheck.org that it does not dispute the accuracy of the report, which analyzed the office's publicly available disbursement forms from fiscal years 2002 to 2008, and found that men working for Clinton had a median salary of $15,708 higher than women.

In fact, the campaign told FactCheck.org that the Free Beacon analysis had been based on “incomplete” information and provided data showing that Clinton paid women equally. From the FactCheck.org article:

“The Free Beacon based their analysis off an incomplete, and therefore inaccurate set of numbers,” said Josh Schwerin, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign. “The fact is, Hillary paid full-time men and women equally.”

The FactCheck.org article states that the campaign supplied Clinton's senate staff employment records, which show that female staffers' median salaries were “virtually identical” to the male staffers' salaries. Those records also indicated that Clinton hired twice the number of women as men.

The article explains that the Free Beacon used a different data set to arrive at its conclusion that women were paid less - and quoted American Enterprise Institute scholar Norman Ornstein, who said he “believes the Clinton campaign methodology provides a more accurate measure of her record on pay equity.”