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HOUSE STAFF

Members of the House of Representatives employed 5,777 staff members who were covered by the study. (For a discussion of employees not covered,

see section of this report on Methodology, p. 4.) The mean (average) salary of House staff was $18,095, with a standard deviation of $9,218. 1/

Average Female Salaries Lower

Table H-1 shows the number and percentage of female and male House staff. Of the total, nearly two-thirds (63.4 percent) were women and onethird (36.6 percent) were men. From Table H-2 it is apparent that overall female salaries were substantially lower than male salaries. The average salary for women was $15,989, while the average for men was $21,745, nearly $6,000 higher. Expressed in terms of percentages, the average salary that female employees earned was only 73.5 percent of the average male employee's salary.

1/ The standard deviation is a measure of how widely dispersed a group of numbers are from the mean. The larger the standard deviation in relation to the mean, the more widely dispersed are the numbers.

The percentage of female to male employees was about the same for both Democratic and Republican offices, as Table H-3 demonstrates. (Political party in this analysis refers to the political party of the employer.)

Democrats had slightly fewer female employees (62.9 percent) than did Republicans (64.7 percent). The difference between the parties in this respect, however, is not great.

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In terms of average salaries, as Table H-4 shows, the difference between the political parties was not large. In Democratic offices, the average salary of women was $16,109, which was 74.8 percent of the average salary of men. In Republican offices, the average female salary was slightly lower, $15,768, or 71.3 percent of the average male salary.

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More Women at Bottom of Salary Range

Table H-5 and Figure H-1 display the range of salaries for female and male House staff. More of the women's salaries than of the men's

were grouped at the lower end of the salary range. Over 30 percent
of all female salaries fell in the $12,000 to $15,999 interval,
one of the lowest in the salary range.

More than half (56.5 percent) of women's salaries fell below $16,000, while only about one-third (35.0 percent) of the men's salaries were that low. Nearly 80 percent (79.0 percent) of the women, but only slightly over half (51.3 percent) of the men, had salaries of less than $20,000. Over 90 percent (93.9 percent) of the women earned less than $28,000, compared to just under three-quarters (74.0 percent) of the men.