MisInformation Exchange

MISSING: Equal Pay Initiatives and Information

April 19, 2005

April 19 is Equal Pay Day, organized by the National Committee on Pay Equity, and marked by women’s policy and research organizations around the country.The Committee explains: “Equal Pay Day is observed in April to indicate how far into each year a woman must work to earn as much as a man earned in the previous year. Tuesday symbolizes the day when women's wages catch up to men's wages from the previous week.” According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (NCRW Member Center), women currently make, on average, about 76 cents to the dollar earned by white men (differences that also vary greatly according to sector, race, ethnicity, and region). NCRW Member Center Business and Professional Women USA note that, “o ver a working lifetime, this wage disparity costs the average American woman an estimated $500,000.”

This year, Women’s Prerogative delivered a petition to the Secretary of the Department of Labor, Elaine Chao, urging the Department to address the issue. Citing NCRW’s MISSING report, Women’s Prerogatives charged the DOL with removing important information on the wage gap from its website. They also cited several other instances where the DOL had been moving away from its responsibilities to women workers:

• The Administration eliminated the Equal Pay Matters Initiative, which gave funding to both the DOL and Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for the enforcement of pay discrimination laws, and, among other things, outreach efforts to inform women workers of their rights.
• The Department has announced that it will stop collecting data on women in the Current Employment survey (see the MisInformation Blog for more)
• The DOL has not circulated a survey about equal pay to all federal contractors.
• The DOL plans to limit the tools it uses to investigate and determine whether federal contractors violate equal pay laws.

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