Every few months, the equal pay for women issue gets back on the front burner for the White House.
And here we are again, as President Obama will sign two executive orders Tuesday, meant to promote more equal pay for women.
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President Barack Obama
I say "meant to," because it's not entirely clear that they will accomplish anything on Main Street. The first order will require federal contractors to provide the government with extensive pay data based on employee gender and race. The second act will bar the same contractors from retaliating against employees who disclose and/or complain about salary data.
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One reason why I'm not so impressed with this effort is the pay data from the White House itself.
It turns out even the female staffers on the Obama staff make less than the average male staffer, about 90 cents on the dollar to be exact.
What?!?! How can that be?!?! Is President Obama a terrible hypocrite and closet chauvinist?
Of course he isn't. The simple fact is that the White House isn't any more guilty of discriminating against women than just about every other business in America.
But what about the statistics that show women make just 77 cents for every dollar than men?!?
That number may be true, but it focuses on all workers in all jobs, and that's terribly misleading.
At the White House and the rest of America, women tend to make less than men because women are more likely to choose lower-paying careers.
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The Obama administration is quick to point out that its pay disparity is only an overall number, and that women and men in the same or comparable jobs at the White House do make the same pay.
But the White House won't extend the same courtesy to everyone else this week when it will undoubtedly trumpet that 77-cents-on-the-dollar statistic. So the Obama administration's hypocrisy isn't in the way it treats and paid women staffers, but in the way it treats the statistics.
That's because those statistics don't say anything about the same pay for the same job.
Without any government prodding, women and men working the exact same job are making much closer to the same exact pay. In fact, in many cases, women are starting to make more than the men in comparable positions. And the younger the workers, the more likely they're making equal pay gender-wise.
Another big wrench in this entire effort is maternity leave. Even the women who work for companies that do have generous maternity leave packages are going to take a hit to their annual salaries, especially if they decide to stay at home longer than three months per child.
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I don't think it's a bad thing to encourage more companies to offer paid maternity leave for more months, but to make it a mandatory federal law will very likely encourage more companies to hire a lot fewer women to begin with.
And that's the core problem here. This administration is addicted to regulation, and the hurdles to hiring those regulations create continue to depress our jobs and wage numbers.
But signing these executive orders will garner the President some favorable headlines and maybe gain a vote or two for the Democrats in the November elections.
And that's really all this is about anyway.
Jake Novak is supervising producer of "Street Signs." Follow him on Twitter @jakejakeny.
