Ivanka Trump on Tuesday said she supported a White House decision to stop a planned Obama-era rule that would have required companies to submit data on worker pay by race, ethnicity, and gender, after the Trump administration deemed the regulation too burdensome to business.
The rule, introduced by President Barack Obama’s administration in January 2016, would have forced all employers with at least 100 workers to disclose summary data on wages in an effort to enforce equal pay laws and expose discriminatory pay practices. It would have covered some 63 million workers.
The Trump administration called the regulation “enormously burdensome” and said that it wouldn’t “actually help gather information about wage and employment discrimination.”
Ivanka Trump agreed:
“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results. We look forward to continuing to work with…all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”
“Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results. We look forward to continuing to work with…all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”
The first daughter, who’s cast herself as a champion of women’s empowerment, has actually expressed interest in these types of laws before.
When she appeared alongside German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a women’s entrepreneurship panel in Berlin in April, she mentioned an equal pay policy passed there.
“I know that Chancellor Merkel, just this past March you passed an equal pay legislation to promote transparency and to try to finally narrow that gender pay gap,” she said at the time. “And that’s something we should all be looking at—to see the efficacy of that policy as it gets rolled out.”
Germany’s law is similar to the Obama-era rule in what it asks of employers, though its bar for participation is higher. It requires companies with 200 or more employees to disclose information about salaries and to document any gender pay gap. Employers with at least 500 employees are encouraged—but not legally obligated—to report regularly on their equal pay efforts.
Manuela Schwesig, Germany’s minister for women and families who championed the measure, has said it’s meant to ensure that “wage determination is no longer a black box.”
That was the idea behind Obama’s rule, too. “We can’t know what we don’t know,” said former Labor Secretary Thomas Perez in support of it last year.