Hillary Clinton Brings Special Brand of Hypocrisy to Silicon Valley

Hillary Clinton in Silicon Valley (Jose Marcio Sanchez / Associated Press)
Jose Marcio Sanchez / Associated Press
William Bigelow

The monumental hypocrisy of Hillary Clinton emerged full-blown on Tuesday as she spoke in Silicon Valley about “shocking” pay disparities between men and women. Speaking at the Lead On Watermark Conference for Women at the Santa Clara Convention Center before a crowd of 5,000 people, Clinton intoned that data on women’s pay inequity was “sobering” and “shocking,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

She pointed to a Forbes list of 100 top tech venture capitalists, snapping, “only four are women” and “just 11 percent of executives in Silicon Valley and only about 20 percent of software developers overall are women.” She added more fuel to the fire by quoting a gender pay gap studies on Silicon Valley asserting that “a woman with a bachelor’s degree here tends to make 60 percent less than a man with the same degree.”

Clinton tweeted last April,

According to Julia Love, a tech reporter for siliconvalley.com, Clinton said, “You bump your heads on the glass ceilings that persist in the tech industry. It’s time to think different.” Love added, “Clinton, who is widely expected to announce a presidential campaign later this year, was the biggest draw at the conference hosted by Watermark, a group that advocates for women in the workforce–and her message did not disappoint.”

But the Hillary Clinton who uses women’s pay inequity to shill for the women’s vote (and for donor dollars) is the same woman who, as a United States Senator, paid women on her staff 72 cents for each dollar paid to men, as the Washington Free Beacon reported from an analysis of her Senate years’ salary data.

As Breitbart California editor Joel Pollak tweeted:

Love answered: “Not that I heard, would have been interesting to hear!”

Data compiled by the Free Beacon showed that the women on Clinton’s senatorial staff made a median annual salary $15,708.38 less than the median salary for a man. The Beacon stated, “The analysis compiled the annual salaries paid to staffers for an entire fiscal year of work from the years 2002 to 2008. Salaries of employees who were not part of Clinton’s office for a full fiscal year were not included. Because the Senate fiscal year extends from Oct. 1 to Sept. 30, Clinton’s first year in the Senate, which began on Jan. 3, 2001, was also not included in the analysis.”

Clinton’s abysmal record of paying her women staffers less did not arise from ignorance of the issue; as Correct the Record noted, she co-chaired a Senate hearing on the need to close the pay gap between men and women in 2007.

Clinton may still also reek of hypocrisy as she gears up for her expected 2016 presidential run; The Washington Post reported that she will use “President Obama’s heavily male campaign apparatus” to manage the prospective campaign.

As if her hypocrisy on women’s pay inequity wasn’t enough, Clinton also ignored the rampant sexual history of her own husband, commenting on the sexual harassment lawsuit revolving around the Silicon Valley venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield and Byers. “We have to recognize that in tech, which has just exploded, it’s been a very almost Wild West” atmosphere… a lot of women find that distasteful, a situation almost resembling a locker room,” she said, according to the Chronicle.

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