The Clinton Foundation's Gender Pay Gap Worried Campaign
By Jose Pagliery
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Hillary Clinton says men and women should make equal pay. But the Clinton Foundation's leadership team had an average $81,000 average gender pay gap, according to the most recent figures available.
This pay gap was so wide that the Clinton campaign worried that the "huge discrepancies" would be noticed by journalists, according to internal Clinton campaign emails exposed by WikiLeaks.
The stark numbers come from the foundation's public 990 tax forms for the year 2014, which list the highest-paid employees. The Clinton Foundation identifies its top leaders, all executives with titles like CEO, director or senior adviser.
That list included four women and nine men. The men averaged $291,000 in total pay. The women averaged $210,000. Many of the men clearly outranked the women in the leadership team.
The women earned 72 cents for every dollar a male executive made on average.
That's worse than the national average Clinton cites in her "equal pay for equal work" speeches. The national average is 79 cents on the dollar.
The foundation's pay gap was even wider in 2013, when the highest-paid women earned 63 cents for every dollar made by the highest-paid men.
The foundation has not yet released last year's salary data.
In another batch of stolen emails published by WikiLeaks, the foundation listed the salaries of its 62 employees working in 2011.
On average, the women made 89 cents on the dollar compared to the men. The average woman made $62,000. The average man made $70,000.
The payroll that year included 36 women and 26 men.
The foundation's pay scale would seem to clash with Clinton's stump speeches on equal pay.
"The failure to ensure equal pay for women also impacts families and the broader economy... it devalues the work that women do," Clinton said in a New York City speech on April 12.
Clinton's presidential campaign spotted the pay gap in February 2015 -- and acknowledged its severity, according to emails exposed by WikiLeaks.
"There are huge discrepancies, and it wouldn't surprise me if they went here next," public relations expert Ian Mandel warned the Clinton campaign.
He was alerting Clinton's presidential campaign manager, Robert Mook, and the research director at Hillary for America, Tony Carrk. At the time last year, reporters were probing equal pay during Clinton's tenure at the State Department.
CNNMoney reached out to all three women at the bottom of the list in 2013, but it received no reply.
Nonprofit tax documents are publicly available for review. However, they only list the salaries of the highest-paid employees. It's unclear if the pay gap is better or worse for lower level jobs at the Clinton Foundation.
Asked about the gender salary gap, the foundation pointed to a blog post written by president Donna Shalala on Tuesday.
"Recent allegations on pay discrepancies at the Clinton Foundation are inaccurate. These calculations are based only on a handful of salaries that do not provide an accurate portrayal of the leadership and staff at Clinton Foundation," she wrote.
She noted that 64 percent of the foundation's employees in the United States are women. However, she did not address the pay scales for those employees.
Clinton's presidential campaign did not respond to a request for comment.
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