Mills Promotes Equal Pay Day While Paying Her Own Male Staff More than Female Staff

Gov. Janet Mills (D-Maine) issued a proclamation last week commemorating “Equal Pay Day,” while her female staff makes less than her male staff.

[RELATED: Gender Pay Gap: Gov. Mills’ Male Staff Make More Than Female Counterparts…]

“On this Equal Pay Day, let us recommit to paying women fairly and equally based on their experience, their responsibilities, and their qualifications so that we can level the playing field for women across Maine and ensure that our state provides opportunity for all,” said Gov. Mills.

Equal Pay Day commemorates the day on which an average woman would allegedly have earned the same amount as the average man in the previous year.

The claim is that if an average man could work all of 2023 to make $50,000, an average woman would need to work all of 2023 plus three months of 2024 in order to earn the same amount.

In the proclamation, Mills repeated a commonly cited statistic that women earn 84 cents for every dollar earned by men, and that the difference is even greater among women from racial minorities.

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That data, however, collects salary information from all full-time workers without taking into account numerous relevant factors such as experience, qualifications, and industry demographics.

A report from PayScale revealed that the “controlled” gender pay gap is actually 99 cents to the dollar for individual contributors.

Nevertheless, Mills persists in suggesting that employers throughout the state are flagrantly violating anti-discrimination laws en masse by paying women less than men with the same amount of experience for the same work.

According to Mill’s own standard however, she is committing an injustice against female employees herself.

Averaging the total compensation of the top 10 male and female workers in the governor’s office based on 2023 data, reveals that the top 10 male workers earned $138,026, including insurance, stipends, and retirement, while women earned $127,471.

Therefore, men working for Mills’ office earned $10,555 more per year than the governor’s female employees, a wage gap of 92.4%.

This data, of course, does not take into account the positions of the employees, the quality of work from each employee, or the employee’s level of experience.

Nevertheless, that is the standard by which Mills is condemning other Maine employers, and, by that same standard, Mills is contributing to the “gender pay gap.”