Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Tuesday slammed the notion that fighting for better economic opportunities for women means playing “the gender card.”
“If talking about equal pay and paid family leave and more opportunities for women and their children is playing the gender card, then deal me in,” she said during a roundtable on equal pay in New York.
{mosads}Clinton said women deserve exactly the same compensation as their male counterparts in any business.
“Some say there isn’t a gender pay gap,” she said. “That is just wrong. The typical woman working full time in 2014 was paid 79 percent of men were paid.
“The last time I checked, there is no discount for being a woman. Groceries don’t cost us less, rent doesn’t cost us less. Why should we be paid less?”
Clinton said confusion over gender pay disparity remains the greatest obstacle to correcting the problem.
“Our challenge is to really demand transparency,” she said. “We don’t know what exactly the pay gaps are in many settings, particularly in the private sector.
“If you’re a man married to a woman, if you’re the son of a working woman, if you’re the father of a young working woman, this is your problem too,” Clinton added. “Perhaps the greatest myth of all is that there are no solutions to these problems. I absolutely reject that. We can if we summon the political will.”
The Republican National Committee on Tuesday accused Clinton of hypocrisy on equal pay.
“Democrats should look in the mirror before they wrongly claim the moral high ground on equal pay,” said RNC co-chair Sharon Day in a statement.
“Hillary Clinton’s Senate office and the Clinton Foundation both paid women less than man, a clear failure to back up her rhetoric with action,” Day added.
“Equal pay for equal work is a basic principle of fairness and we should be working together to ensure it is honored in every workplace. Instead, Democrats only offer hypocritical and cynical attacks designed to score political points.”
–This report was updated at 2:11 p.m.