It just got harder (again) for women and minorities to be confident that their pay rate is not discriminatory.
Reuters reports that the Trump administration has blocked a rule that would have required employers to report pay data that breaks down the information by gender, race and ethnicity. Business groups have fought the rule, which was put in place under former President Obama, claiming it "would not have the intended effect of addressing wage gaps."
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission adopted the requirements in 2016, saying the information was necessary to identify and address discriminatory wage gaps. Companies would have been required to begin reporting next March.
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EEOC Acting Chair Victoria Lipnic, a Republican who voted against the requirements last year, said that cancellation of the new rule would not affect the commission's efforts to enforce anti-discrimination laws against individual employers. And Ivanka Trump, advisor to the president, who had positioned herself as a champion for women, issued a statement saying that the EEOC requirements would not have helped address discrepancies in pay for men and women.
However, in an example of how effective such a regulation could have been for women and minorities, a recent report by the BBC on its own pay structure under new salary reporting requirements, revealed that the British broadcaster operates with massive disparities in pay between male and female presenters.
The broadcaster, which operates under a royal charter, was required by that charter to publish salaries of those making more than £150,000. The report resulted in a huge outcry over discrimination as well as demands for changes in how the BBC pays its staff to create a more equitable structure. Being required to publish its own salary structure certainly resulted in the BBC's wage gaps being addressed — in a very public manner.
The Huffington Post reports that the halted regulation "would have been a critical first step in figuring out the scope of the pay gap at different companies." It also highlights the backing away by Ivanka Trump from one of her stated causes — equal pay for women — by Trump's endorsement of her father's action in killing the regulation.
Women's groups, the report says, "universally decried the move" as well as what they see as a betrayal by Trump of her "purported commitment to working women."
"This is not a technical tweak as they would have you believe. Make no mistake — it's an all-out attack on equal pay," Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, says in a statement. "Today's action sends a clear message to employers. If you want to ignore pay inequities and sweep them under the rug, this administration has your back."
"For somebody [Ivanka Trump] who has long held herself out as a champion for women and for gender equality, it's really disappointing," says Vicki Shabo, vice president for workplace policy and strategy at the National Partnership for Women and Families. "[This] spits in the eye of gender equality and in the eyes of women and people of color who are so often paid less and do not know."
The report highlights the wage gap, citing federal data showing that in the U.S., women are paid 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. Women of color do even worse, with Hispanic women earning 54 cents on the dollar and black women 63 cents.
"Even when researchers analyze the data and account for differences in education and time spent in the labor force, the wage gap persists," the report says.
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