The Obama administration is proposing a new rule that would require companies with more than 100 workers to annually report pay information to the government for employees broken down by gender, race and ethnicity.
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Labor Department published the rule in the Federal Register on Friday, the seventh anniversary of the signing of President Obama’s first law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act.
Obama will make a speech about the anniversary Friday afternoon and discuss his latest move to ensure pay equity for women and minorities.
The proposal, which would cover more than 63 million employees, expands an earlier Labor Department plan for federal contractors and subcontractors to collect and report such information that stemmed from a memo Obama issued in April 2014.
Under the proposal, which is subject to a 60-day comment period, companies would have to begin submitting the information in September of 2017. The EEOC estimated businesses’ initial compliance cost companies about $400 to comply, because the proposal just adds pay categories to information companies already report to the EEOC.
The administration stated that the additional data “will help focus public enforcement of our equal pay laws and provide better insight into discriminatory pay practices across industries and occupations.”
Cecilia Munoz, White House domestic policy adviser, said the administrations hopes that “businesses will take this on as a goal and achieve the very thing that we’re trying to arrive at before enforcement ever becomes an issue.”
The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act is named for the woman who took her case of pay discrimination to the Supreme Court, which ruled against her in 2007 because she didn’t file her complaint within 180 days of first being short-changed. The law resets that 180-day clock for filing complaints after each allegedly discriminatory paycheck is issued.
The proposal also coincides with a new report from the Council of Economic Advisers that found the gender wage gap in the U.S. is 2.5 percentage points larger than the average for industrialized countries.
The White House also announced that it will host a “United State of Women” summit May 23.
