In a crowded mayor's race with an all-male crew of front-runners, an unlikely issue has shot to the front of the debate: equal pay for women, at city hall itself and in the city at large.

After a national study released in April found the pay gap between men and women in Seattle to be the worst of the country's 50 largest metro areas, the city decided to look more closely at its own employees. Turns out, there's a real problem: The city payroll is two-thirds men, pays men on average 9.5 percent more than women, and has fewer women in higher-paid positions.

So the mayoral candidates—all primed to elbow each other out of the way to fill the first pothole—now routinely bring up the issue of gender pay.

Especially mayoral candidate and Seattle City Council member Bruce Harrell, who touts work on pay equity in his campaign ads. At the very top of a recent campaign flyer's list of promises—above all the blurbs on transit and education and police—Harrell says that as mayor, he'll "institute legislation to improve women's pay equity in the workplace," and he claims to be the "first local legislator to discuss [the] issue and take action."

Some other candidates have stumbled.

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