Fixing the “gender pay gap” has become a staple of Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton’s stump speech but in a speech to the Accenture Women’s Leadership Forum in October 2012, Clinton claimed that the laws to fix the problem are already on the books.
The transcript of her speech was included in the release of 2,050 emails by Wikileaks on Friday.
“Well, I think we have laws on the books,” Clinton says, according to the Wikileaks transcript.” Enforcing them is the first step. And too often it is very difficult for the woman who herself is being discriminated against.”
This rhetoric from Clinton about the laws already being there to fix the gender pay gap are in stark contrast to other comments she has made on the campaign trail.
According to Cosmopolitan magazine article in April 2016, Clinton said:
The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen the Equal Pay Act by holding employers responsible for proving that pay differences between men and women are based on a qualification that’s a business necessity and not gender. The Act would also ban companies from retaliating against employees who raise concerns about gender-based wage discrimination in the workplace.
The difference between what Clinton is saying to the public and what she says in private can also be explained in transcripts from the Wikileaks release. As reported by Breitbart News Friday, Clinton told the National Multi-Housing Council in 2013 that politicians should “have both a public and private position.”
In private, Clinton elaborated on the way she really feels about addressing the gender pay gap:
You know, the Lilly Ledbetter case which established firmly the absolute right to be paid equally for equal work was a great step forward, but if people don’t know about it, if they don’t have a safe harbor to go to to get somebody to advocate for them, you know, it’s not going to increase the number of women being paid what they should be paid. So I think first and foremost, we have to enforce the law.
In public, Clinton regularly uses the gender pay gap as an issue to appeal to women. In April, Time Magazine ran an article titled “Hillary Clinton Calls for Closing Wage Gap on Equal Pay Day”
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