Obama Vows Zero Tolerance on Gender Wage Gap
Apr 8, 2014 1:38pm
With midterm elections on the horizon, President Obama today took aim at the countrys persistent gender wage gap an issue Democrats see as key to winning-over women voters.
Obama signed an executive order that forces federal contractors to allow employees to discuss their pay with each other. He also signed a presidential memorandum requiring contractors to report pay data based on sex and race to the Labor Department. White House officials said both actions will encourage transparency.
(Credit: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
Pay secrecy fosters discrimination, and we should not tolerate it, not in federal contracting or anywhere else, Obama said.
There are great employers out there who do the right thing, and there are plenty of employers out there who are absolutely certain that theres no pay discrimination happening in their offices, but then sometimes when the datas laid out, it paints a different picture, Obama said. We want to encourage them to fix these problems, if they exist, by making sure that the datas out there.
The latest U.S. Census statistics show that, on average, full-time working women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by men nationwide a gap that has held fairly steady during Obamas presidency.
By other measures, such as comparing men and women in a single type of job or accounting for factors like education and family status, the pay gap is much smaller.
While secrecy has been a factor in some pay discrimination, experts say the biggest culprit behind the 77-cent figure is a broader social disparity between women and men in the roles they assume types of occupations they pursue and income levels they achieve in certain professional fields.
The dynamic is even evident on the White House staff where, according to a recent study by the conservative think-tank American Enterprise Institute whose findings are not disputed by the White House, women earn on average 88 cents to the dollar men make. Administration officials have say women happen to hold more lower-paying jobs in the administration, but deny a disparity in pay for the same work. All federal salaries are public information, and men and women performing the same jobs are paid exactly the same.
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