While the US President’s decision to scrap Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) legislation has been making headlines, the little-known equal pay rule has quietly been thrown out, Mashable reports.
Under the scheme set to be introduced in 2018, businesses with over 100 employees would have had to disclose pay data on top of the information on gender, race and ethnicity they already provide to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The policy was intended to help close the gender wage gap, where women are paid less than men for the same jobs.
But businesses complained about the strain the rule would have on them and whether the information would be kept securely.
Transparency needed to solve wage gap
Now the Wall Street Journal is reporting the Trump administration has directed the EEOC to shelve it, labelling it “unnecessarily burdensome”.
In the US, women make an average of 79 cents for every dollar a man makes.
But without pay discrepancies being made public, it’s hard to work out which industries and positions have a greater gap – and work towards resolving it.
“We’d learn about a pay-discrimination problem because someone saw a piece of paper left on a copy machine or someone was complaining about their salary to co-workers,” former head of the EOCC Jenny Yang said.
No wonder the latest data shows women are the reason Trump’s approval ratings have dropped to a historic new low.
