AUGUSTA – Maine Gov. Janet Mills’s male employees are making more money than their female counterparts, according to The Maine Wire’s analysis of employee wage and benefits data for last year.
The top 15 highest earning male employees made an average of $115,055 in total compensation, while the top 15 highest earning female employees made, on average, only $110,437.
If you take the median compensation for both sexes but only for employees making more than Maine’s annual minimum wage, the median male makes $106,200 and the median female makes $91,003 – a gap of $15,197. (See an important note about the methodology we used to interpret state compensation data below.)
Any way you slice the data, Mills’ staff salaries reflect a pay gap between the sexes that she and the Maine Democratic Party have dedicated themselves to abolishing.
Methodology
Using wage and compensation data provided by the State Controller for 2021, we calculated the total compensation per employee, including salary, overtime, stipends and all health and insurance benefits.
We then selected the top 15 highest compensated employees from both sexes. We selected the top 15 because there were several employees whose total compensation fell below $20,000 per year, or even below $10,000 per year, which we considered incomplete data. If you do not use this methodology and instead take the average of all male employees and all female employees, the pay gap actually grows to more than $10,000. That is, males make on average $80,775, while females make on average $70,054.
If you take the average of all employees making over the annual salary for a minimum wage worker in Maine ($26,520), the average male employee makes $101,984 and the average female employee makes $85,067, a sex-based pay gap of $16,917. If you take the median compensation, rather than the mean/average, of all employees, the gap between median male pay ($106,200) and median female pay ($91,727) stretches to $14,473.
Lastly, if you take the median compensation for both sexes but only for employees making more than the annual minimum wage, the median male makes $106,200 and the median female makes $91,003 – a gap of $15,197.
In other words, no matter how you massage the data, the men working for Janet Mills are paid more than the women working for Janet Mills.
