One Effort to Close the Gender Pay Gap Won’t Get a Try
Asian women earn 87 percent of what white men earn, while black women earn 65 percent and Hispanic women earn 58 percent.
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The Obama administration had an idea it thought would help address the pay gap between white men
and almost everyone else: requiring companies to report how much they paid people, along with their sex and race.
Black and Hispanic men also earn less than white men, while Asian men out-earn them.
Researchers who have studied the few instances in which companies have publicly disclosed individual salaries say it is not enough
to close pay gaps, nor is it essential — some companies have closed them on their own, without publicly reporting pay information.
The Obama regulation required that employers with at least 100 workers include aggregate, anonymous information about
pay for categories of employees, on a form they already submit with information on sex, race and ethnicity.
White women’s median hourly earnings are 82 percent of those of white men, according
to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics data.
“Part of the motivation behind it would be to shame certain employers
that found large gaps into doing something and taking proactive steps,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the issue.