The Trump administration just halted this Obama-era rule to shrink the gender wage gap
The move contradicts President Trump’s claim that he wants prosperity for every American
Adapted from a story by The Washington Post’s Danielle Paquette.
On Tuesday evening, the Trump administration halted a rule that would have required large companies to report to the government what they pay employees by race and gender — an Obama-era policy that aimed to close what economists call the wage gap.
Fatima Goss Graves, president and chief executive of the National Women’s Law Center, said the move contradicts President Trump’s claim that he wants prosperity for every American.
“It’s not enough to say ‘equal pay,’ “ Grave said. “It matters what policies you stand behind.”
The current pay gap
- Federal law has banned pay discrimination since 1963.
- Women, though, still earn an average of 79 cents for every dollar paid to men.
- The gap is larger for black women, who take home 60 cents for every white man’s dollar, and Hispanic women, who average out at 55 cents.
- It did not require congressional approval.
- It would have given the EEOC more reach in its efforts to investigate firms with glaring pay disparities.
- Starting next year, companies with more than 100 employees and federal contractors with at least 50 would have had to report more detailed salary data to the EEOC on a form they already annually submit to the agency.
- The EEOC could choose to look into a business’ practices and perhaps launch a discrimination lawsuit.
Opposition to the Obama-era rule
Some in the business community strongly opposed the measure, saying it added an unfair burden to a company’s workload. Others said the data would not have offered a clear enough picture to right any economic wrongs.
Nancy Hammer, senior government affairs policy counsel at the Society for Human Resource Management, a global business group with 270,000 members, said the expanded data-collection process still lacked specificity to find evidence of discrimination.
“We didn’t think it would help them solve the issue they were trying to solve, which is rooting out pay discrimination,” Hammer said. “Pay has a lot of variables, and the way they collected the data was in pretty big categories.”
Hammer said wage disparities remain a problem in the United States. She recommends that employees go to their human resources department if they’re concerned about their paycheck, giving their employer a chance to explain or fix the issue.
Otherwise, Hammer said, “to really do it, you’d need to practically report on every single employee. That’s not a practical way of looking at this issue nationwide.”
How the rule was halted
In a letter sent Tuesday to Victoria Lipnic, acting chair of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, said the Office of Management and Budget had paused the government’s pay data collection process to review it.
“OMB is concerned that some aspects of the revised collection of information lack practical utility, are unnecessarily burdensome, and do not adequately address privacy and confidentiality issues,” Rao wrote, according to documents obtained by The Washington Post.
Ivanka Trump’s involvement
Ivanka Trump released a statement hours later.
“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” the president’s daughter said. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”
A source close to Ivanka Trump, who works as an unpaid adviser to her father, said she initially wanted to support the measure. Then she consulted experts and worried that it wouldn’t work as intended.
Criticisms directed at Ivanka Trump
Graves said that Ivanka Trump’s platform to fight discrimination at work now seems flimsy.
“We have seen her say the words ‘equal pay’ and that she supports equal pay,” Graves said, “but halting an equal pay policy, which would have brought transparency and improved enforcement and made employers more accountable — that shows her rhetoric doesn’t match reality.
