Amanda Marcotte, Politics, Aug 31, 2017<\/p>\n
The Trump administration recently announced plans to halt the implementation of an Obama-era rule<\/a>\u00a0that requires employers with more than 100 workers\u00a0to submit\u00a0employee pay data, broken down by race and gender, to the\u00a0Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). This decision has attracted headlines as further proof that Ivanka Trump, who defended the move, is a hypocrite who pretends to support working women but who can\u2019t be bothered to actually help them. But a deeper look at this decision reveals that the story is even more bizarre than that. It underscores that the Trump administration is not just indifferent to civil rights issues, but openly hostile to any moves that might make life more fair for women and people of color.<\/p>\n The official reason for this decision is that the regulation in question is \u201cenormously burdensome\u201d and ineffective. Ivanka Trump backed up this excuse by arguing that \u201cthe proposed policy would not yield the intended results\u201d and\u00a0claiming that she supports \u201crobust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.\u201d<\/p>\n All of this is complete nonsense. There\u2019s no reason to think the EEOC rule was either ineffectual or burdensome to employers.<\/p>\n As Fatima Goss Graves<\/a>, president and CEO of the National Women\u2019s Law Center, explained to Salon, the Obama administration did years of work trying to figure out the level of burden to employers and ultimately created a system that would collect the necessary information \u201cusing data that employers are already required under the law to maintain and collect.\u201d<\/p>\n Many in the business community criticized the policy<\/a> because they worried that the data collected would oversimplify the issue of pay disparities between men and women, but even they could not argue that it was particularly burdensome to collect the data. Employers already fill out the\u00a0EEO-1, which collects data on the race and gender of employees. The change just\u00a0requires adding compensation information.<\/p>\n This is necessary because without such a rule there\u2019s no systematic way to look at whether employers are paying people differently by race and gender. Most employers keep that information under wraps, and the few legal challenges there are regarding equal pay tend to start by happenstance \u2014 employees accidentally see an H.R. document or find out each other\u2019s salaries during after-hours conversation.<\/p>\n It\u2019s also important to understand that this rule was primarily intended as a preventive measure, not as some kind of trap to ensnare employers.<\/p>\n \u201cThe goal of this pay rule is to have employers do an audit, understand their pay problems and fix it,\u201d explained Goss Graves. \u201cIn doing that, that allows for a bit more sunlight on a problem that is typically in the dark, but also allows for employers to do some self-correcting.\u201d<\/p>\n No doubt, many employers are concerned that exposing this information and collecting it in a government-run database opens them up to legal challenges and complaints. But that\u2019s the wrong way\u00a0to look at this situation. In reality, being forced to audit their wage practices could go a long way towards preventing EEOC complaints and lawsuits by addressing the core causes that makes them possible.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best way for an employer to prevent a lawsuit is to pay their employees right the first time,\u201d Goss Graves said.\u00a0\u201cEmployers who don\u2019t think they should pay their employees fairly probably should be sued, because clearly they aren\u2019t drawn by other notions of accountability. But I think most employers want to do the right thing. This is the sort of rule that will prompt them to take the steps to ensure they are paying their workers fairly.\u201d<\/p>\n As for the idea that this rule was ineffective, there\u2019s no real evidence for that. No one, Goss Graves argued, thinks this rule is the end-all, be-all for fighting unequal pay in our society. Much of the wage gap goes back to larger systemic issues regarding what kinds of educational and employment opportunities different people get in the first place. Conservatives often try to frame this question as a matter of \u201cchoice\u201d issue, claiming or implying that women make less because they \u201cchoose\u201d lower-paying fields.<\/p>\n But research shows that pay discrimination in the workforce continues to be a problem. As Claire Cain Miller of The New York Times wrote in 2014<\/a>, \u201ca majority of the pay gap between men and women actually comes from differences within <\/em>occupations, not between them \u2014 and widens in the highest-paying ones like business, law and medicine.\u201d<\/p>\n Even controlling for age, race, hours and education, female doctors only earn\u00a071 percent of what their male counterparts do. Female lawyers and judges earn 82 percent of what men in the same jobs do. Even computer programming, a job women are frequently instructed<\/a>to take up if they want to make man-levels of money, has a pay gap, with women earning 90 cents to every male dollar.<\/p>\n So no one thinks that pressuring employers to be honest with themselves about what they\u2019re paying their employees will fix the entire problem. But it can go a long way towards making sure employers aren\u2019t systematically paying women less than men, for doing the same work.<\/p>\n The Obama-era rule is neither burdensome nor ineffectual and may even be a help to employers in the long run. This choice is likely just another example of how\u00a0the Trump administration\u00a0is actively working to turn back the clock on social progress \u2014 and undo anything and everything with Barack Obama\u2019s name on it. For Trump, making America \u201cgreat again\u201d is about undermining women and people of color for no other purpose than to\u00a0preserve the privileged status of white men. Empty words from his daughter won\u2019t change that.<\/p>\n