The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) intends to increase its enforcement resources and to partner with the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) to compile and analyze the data–-affecting more than 63 million workers nationwide–to try to discern which corporations may be engaging in discriminatory activity.
EEOC Chair Jenny Yang feels the effort won’t unduly strain companies’ resources, as it’s a matter of expanding employee information they already submit to government agencies on a regular basis. Some economists and statisticians, however, say aggregating pay data may be more complicated than that, as are some of the reasons that women earn less.
Attempting to close the wage gap has been a long-standing goal of the President’s since he took office. Despite his stated efforts, and convening a task force to study the issue early in his first term, women across all professions still earn just 79 cents of every dollar earned by their male counterparts. Yang expects employers to submit their first gender-segregated pay data in September 2017, after President Obama leaves office.