The Department of Labor Proposed a New Rule to Help Fight Pay Discrimination – Take Action Below!
Seven years ago today, President Barack Obama signed into law his first piece of legislation as President, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. At today’s event celebrating the anniversary, the president directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), in partnership with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL), to publish a proposal to annually collect summary pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees. This step also expands on and replaces an earlier AAUW-supported plan DOL to collect similar information from federal contractors.
The new proposal will cover over 63 million employees, and the data collected would provide critical insights into the gender and racial pay gap. This step, stemming from a recommendation of the President’s Equal Pay Task Force and a Presidential Memorandum issued on Equal Pay Day 2014, will help focus public enforcement of equal pay laws and provide better insight into discriminatory pay practices across industries and occupations.
DOL has identified the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) as the best collector of this summary data from employers. AAUW has long asserted that this kind of transparency is associated with a smaller gender pay gap, and that the implementation of this nationwide data collection is an important step in our efforts to ensure fair pay for all.
The announcement of the proposed rule is an innovative improvement over the April 2014 memorandum; it’s more efficient, dramatically less costly for business, and utilizes existing mechanisms to collect and report the data through the annual EEO-1 filing process.
Women and people of color continue to face significant pay disparities in the United States. In 2014, women typically were paid just 79 percent of what men were paid. The pay gaps are even worse for African-American and Latina women, who earned 63 percent and 54 percent, respectively, of white men’s earnings. Moms also face great pay disparities. Just one year out of college, women with the same major and in the same field were still paid less than their male counterparts. These troubling statistics underscore the need for scrutiny of employers’ pay practices, and the new proposed rule will help us do just that.