Obama’s actions on pay equality have also been criticized by Republicans, who say that gender discrimination is already illegal and that extra measures are unnecessary.
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That “wage gap” means that MS women, on average, earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, or $9,385 less per year.
There’s been a lot of chatter today regarding the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission’s January 29 proposal on equal pay, which would require employers to disclose compensation information as a way to detect pay discrimination.
“Most employers don’t set out to pay women less than men”, says Emily Martin, general counsel of the National Women’s Law Center.
The Obama administration said Friday it would require businesses with at least 100 employees to submit detailed pay data by gender, race and ethnicity in an effort to find firms that are “unlawfully shortchanging workers”. The executive order will require businesses with more than 100 employees to provide the federal government with pay data to identify abuses of equal pay laws.
On Friday, President Obama celebrated the seventh anniversary of signing the Lilly Ledbetter Act into law.
Today, the median wage for a full-time working woman is about $39,000; the median for a full-time working man is $50, 400.
Women’s rights activists have been pushing to gather such data since the late 1960s, Smeal said. “Black women collect 60 cents for every dollar, and Latino women 55 cents for every dollar a white man earns”, he said.
That information would be used to help crack down on companies that still pay women less for doing the same type of work as men, the White House said. But seven years later, as we approach the last Ledbetter anniversary of the Obama presidency, these words have proven to be a defining theme of the administration’s work on equal pay, work that has fundamentally changed the landscape and is critical to future progress.
“It’s a shame that even now, in the 21st Century, we are still waging the fight for equal pay for equal work”.
Obama’s proposal, which will be published by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor, demands companies now include on the forms how they pay each employee, as well as his or her race, gender and ethnicity. “Collecting pay data is a significant step forward in addressing discriminatory pay practices”. Far more often, however, any pay differences that exist between male and female coworkers are for legitimate reasons and are not the result of sexism.
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The White House’s pay gap logic is not celebrated by all, as opponents claim the metric by which the US Bureau of Labor Statistics bases its data is not the most accurate measurement. That wage gap narrowed in the 1990s and grew again after 2000. “That’s not how we’re gonna build a bright future for our country”. The EEOC hopes to finalize the rule by September 2016, with the first reports due in September 2017. Bernie Sanders four days ahead of the first presidential selection contest here, and women – particularly older women – are vital to her support.
