THE WHITE HOUSE declaration that the Republicans have instituted a 'war on women' with their principled opposition to ObamaCare's mandated requirement to provide 'free' contraception is being met with return fire: Romney's assertion that "women account for 92.3 percent of jobs lost since President Obama took office". What's more interesting, in my view, is this story that asserts that women in the White House staff are being paid about 18% less than their male counterparts.

Just for grins, I downloaded the data into an Excel spreadsheet and did a few calculations myself. Here's what I found:

The White House staff is relatively evenly divided between males (53%) and females (47%). [Note: the original data gives name, title, and salary, not sex, so I had to assign sex (M/F) by name. Some names are ambiguous, which may explain why the numbers below don't exactly agree with the post being linked to.]

The female median salary is $62,500 compared to the male median salary of $73,938 - a 15% gap.

The female average salary is $76,839 compared to the male average salary of $86,081 - an 11% gap.

The fact that the average salary is higher than the median salary means that the distribution is skewed in favor of high earners; their salaries are much higher than the low end of the wage scale.

At the lowest salary level ($42,000) there are 54 employees; 57% are female. At the highest salary level ($172,500) there are 21 employees; 33% are female.

And the really big surprise is that Obama's staff totals an amazing 454 people, whose combined salaries (excluding benefits) amount to $37,121,463.