President Barack Obama officially declared Tuesday “National Equal Pay Day,” symbolically marking how much extra work women supposedly must perform to reach pay parity with men.

“Women — who make up nearly half of our nation’s workforce — face a pay gap that means they earn 23 percent less on average than men do. That disparity is even greater for African-American women and Latinas,” Obama said in a statement issued Monday. “On National Equal Pay Day, we recognize this injustice by marking how far into the new year women have to work just to make what men did in the previous one.”

While Obama, who signed the 2009 Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act to make filing employment-discrimination suits easier, has repeatedly lamented statistics showing that men generally earn more than women, the Obama White House has failed in recent years to pay female employees the same amount as male ones.

A January Daily Caller analysis of the gender-pay disparities in the Obama White House revealed that while the women comprised approximately 50 percent of the White House staff in 2012, the median salary for female staffers was 13 percent less than the median salary of male staffers. (RELATED: Read the analysis)

The 13-percent disparity was an improvement from the 2011 disparity of 18 percent that a Washington Free Beacon analysis revealed — and both are better than the national average.

The conservative Independent Women’s Forum, meanwhile, argues that virtually all of the pay disparity between men and women disappears when certain key factors — such as tenure and job type — are considered.

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