• Equal pay FTW. Back in 2017, the Trump administration stopped a planned Obama-era rule that would have required companies to submit data on worker pay by race, ethnicity, and gender. The move was part of a larger effort to roll back the progressive policies of the previous president, and it garnered perhaps outsize attention because Ivanka Trump, self-described champion of working women, threw her support behind it.
In halting the pay reporting policy, Neomi Rao, then Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs administrator (and yes, now Trump’s nominee to replace Brett Kavanaugh at the appellate court level), said the requirement was “enormously burdensome” for business.
A federal judge, it turns out, disagrees. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in D.C. ruled on Monday that the administration had failed to demonstrate the burden Rao had described and ordered the government’s data collection to proceed.
The policy will require employers with at least 100 workers to disclose pay data by race and gender, adding to what they already report to the EEOC on an existing form called the EEO-1. Under Obama, the EEOC had planned to publish aggregate data for the public. When the policy was first introduced, the Obama White House said it would lay “important groundwork for progress toward achieving equal pay” by encouraging employers to evaluate their current pay practices. But industry groups, including the Chamber of Commerce, pushed back, saying the reporting would cost firms $1.3 billion collectively (compared to the EEOC’s $25 million estimate) and invite litigation.
The National Women’s Law Center, which sued the Trump administration alongside other groups for rolling back the rule, called Monday’s decision “a victory for equal pay.”
As equal pay advocates celebrate this win, it’s worth noting just how much the gender pay reporting landscape has changed. Since the Trump administration first scrapped the policy, nations like the U.K. and France have implemented and adopted, respectively, their own reporting rules, more firms have voluntarily identified and closed their gender pay gaps, and some companies—notably Citi—have gone public with their pay gap data; shareholders are pressuring more employers to follow suit.
The Trump administration could appeal Chatkan’s decision, but revisiting the “burden” argument may be hard to do since the data the rule seeks to unearth is now flowing ever more freely.
