Mayor Bill de Blasio’s pay gap is showing.
Males in the city administration currently hold four of the five best-paying jobs, according to the New York Post, with fat salaries as high as $403,000 a year.
“As a result, the males rake in an average of $58,400 a year more than their female colleagues, leaving the women earning just 81 cents for every dollar earned by the men,” the Post reported. “That gap is nearly double the one that exists across New York state, where women earn an average of 90 cents for every dollar earned by men, as calculated by the nonprofit Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, DC. Factoring in de Blasio’s 23 department heads and commissioners — who comprise 12 men and 11 women, each earning $226,000 a year — narrows the gap to 93 cents for every dollar.”
That pay gap is all the more embarrassing for the mayor in light of the letter from his wife, First Lady, Chirlane McCray, that is posted on his web site. It reads, “When Lily Ledbetter, the plaintiff in a landmark pay discrimination case, stood beside President Barack Obama in 2009 as he signed the Fair Pay Act bearing her name into law, I cheered. Finally, equal pay for equal work was the law of the land. But the long arc toward justice is not quite that simple.
The struggle for civil rights didn’t end with the Civil Rights Act, and the LGBTQ rights movement didn’t stop at marriage equality. The work may shift and refocus to new fights and frontiers, but it always, always continues. The same is true in the fight for pay equity. We still have a long way to go. On average, women in the United States still only make 79.6 cents on the dollar as compared to men. And it’s worse for women of color, both nationally and right here in New York City. Asian-American women in NYC earn 63 cents on the dollar. For African-American women, it’s 55 cents. Hispanic women earn just 46 cents on the dollar. In 2017, this is unacceptable. It always was. And it is up to all of us to carry on the fight, because equality is everyone’s responsibility.
De Blasio spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein tried to defend the mayor’s embarrassing pay gap by commenting to the Post: “Under this mayor, more women have a seat at the table than ever before. Over half of our senior leadership positions are held by women and that diversity of thought is apparent in all that we do to improve the lives of New Yorkers.”
