Employers Must Report The Gender Wage Gap
Thank you, President Obama! The White House announces today a new program aimed at closing the gender pay gap.
The program — announced by Valerie Jarrett, a senior advisor to President Obama and Chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls, and Jenny Yang, the Chairwoman of the EEOC - will require companies that employ more than 100 people to report salaries on a form that they already use to report information about gender, age and race. The EEOC will use the information they collect to detect where discriminatory practices may exist.
This new rule expands on a prior 2014 rule requiring such pay disclosures of federal contractors. Now the EEOC's rule applies to all employers with at least 100 employees — which means that over 63 million employers will be required to make such disclosures.
To put the new disclosure in context, it is an evolution of existing rules. Since the late 1960's large companies have always reported to to the EEOC the number of their employees by sex, race, ethnicity and job group. This new rule would add that pay data be listed in 12 salary ranges, though individual employee salaries would be grouped together within these ranges to protect privacy.
"Too often, pay discrimination goes unnoticed because a lack of accurate information about what people are paid," said Yang, as reported in The New York Times.
The White House has helped call much attention to the issue of the gender wage gap, due to which the Department of Labor estimates women earn $.78 for every $1.00 earned by a man.
Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, was also on hand for the announcement. Benioff has made waves by being the first CEO of a major corporation to conduct a compensation audit. He then spent $3 million to close the pay gap that he found existed at Salesforce. "We're never going to close the pay gap if CEO's like myself and others continue to turn a blind eye."
Fairygodboss is also committed to creating transparency around the issue of Equal Pay. Recently, we introduced a new salary database which collects crowdsourced salaries by job title and employer for both women and men.
Do you think women are paid fairly at your company? Submit your anonymous review here - and help the effort to collect information and bring the Gender Wage Gap to light!
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