Women working in Trump's White House only make $0.80 to the man's dollar

The country’s gender wage gap goes all the way to the White House, according to a new CNN analysis.

Using the findings from the White House’s annual report to Congress, which was released on Friday, the outlet found women working in President Donald Trump’s White House earn an average salary of roughly $83,000, while their male colleagues earn an average of roughly $104,000.

That disparity works out to women making just $0.80 to the man’s dollar, a pay gap falling just below the national average: As of April’s Equal Pay Day, women made $0.82 for every dollar earned by a man.

However, the White House’s pay gap problem isn’t specific to Trump.

In 2014, the Washington Post reported that then-President Barack Obama hadn’t yet succeeded in closing the gender wage gap in his White House, albeit a much smaller gap than Trump’s. Under Obama, women in the White House earned an average salary of $78,400 to men’s $88,600, adding up to a 13% wage gap, or $0.87.

Still, a hallmark of Obama’s presidency was his dedication to solving the country’s gender wage gap problem. Just a little over a week into his presidency, Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, equal pay legislation named for a woman who discovered at the end of her 19-year career that she’d been paid less than her male colleagues all along. In 2014, Obama signed an executive order promoting fair pay and safe work conditions, including mandates for paycheck transparency and a ban on forced arbitration in cases of sexual harassment, gender-based discrimination or sexual assault.

In March, Trump revoked the latter Obama-era policy, just days before Equal Pay Day on April 4.

This move, along with Trump’s apparent animus toward other issues affecting women’s lives, means the wage gap could widen under the 45th president. In a December interview with Mic, Fatima Goss Graves, a senior vice president at the National Women’s Law Center, said it’s in Trump’s power to decide if he wants to close it.

“[You can either decide to] change the range of factors that really are leading to lower wages, or you can continue to lean into the things you know cause the problem in the first place,” she said. “That’s the question for the Trump administration: Are they on the side of equal pay [and equal rights] for women?”

Correction: July 3, 2017