California Governor Jerry Brown, a Democrat, signed a law Monday to increase the pay employers must give workers who take time off to care for family members. San Francisco last week became the first U.S. city to require six week of fully paid leave for new parents, and New York state legislators passed a law requiring 12 weeks of partially paid time off.
Earlier this year, President Barack Obama ordered the Equal Opportunity Commission to collect statistics to make it easier to detect illegal pay gaps. The EEOC has proposed requiring companies to report pay data on the EEO-1 forms they file detailing how their workforces break down by race and gender.
“There’s a lack of data about where disparities exist,” Jenny Yang, the agency’s chairman, said in an interview Friday. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce opposes the proposed rules, arguing that they impose burdens on employers, could compromise confidentiality and might generate “false positives” for discrimination.
Some Progress
Right now, men dominate 26 of the 30 top-earning jobs in the U.S., women 23 of the lowest-earning 30, according to Liner’s research. In many industries, men have long held most of the highest paying executive-level positions, while more women have jobs as secretaries. There’s been progress: A women early in her career makes 90 cents on the dollar, according to the research, up from 68 cents on the dollar 35 years ago.
In finance and insurance today, women earn 59 cents for every dollar a man does, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Geographically, the gap is widest in the Bridgeport-Stamford-Norwalk metro area, congruent with Fairfield county, Connecticut, where hedge funds are concentrated. Women there earn 44 cents on the dollar.
The National Committee on Pay Equity, the group behind Equal Pay Day, has since 1996 picked a date to mark how long a woman has to work, based on median pay of all employees as calculated by the U.S. Census Bureau, before she matches what a man earned in the previous year. In 2015, the women’s median was $39,621; the men’s was $50,383. MTV is e-mailing women leaders a “79% Work Clock” that will ring at 3:20 p.m. Tuesday, 79 percent into the work day, to raise awareness.
Politicians have proposed fixes. Some Democrats, for instance, back the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would make it easier to penalize companies for disparity and protect employees who disclose their pay. The Manhattan Institutes’s Furchtgott-Roth said that’s the wrong way to go, because it would burden employers without attacking the essential reasons for the disparity. “We have laws against discrimination,” she said. “We don’t have laws saying certain groups should be paid the same amount no matter what.”