The Obama administration plans to require large employers to peel back the curtain on how much they pay men and women in a push to narrow long-standing earning gaps between the genders.The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will roll out details of the plan Friday to begin gathering a summary of pay data from employers with 100 or more workers.
The data will be used to identify employers that may be engaging in pay discrimination so that the agency can target its enforcement resources where problems may be likeliest to exist. The proposal would cover more than 63 million U.S. workers, according to the White House.
The plan, which will be open to public comment but won't require legislative approval, is part of a broad effort undertaken by President Barack Obama and federal agencies to close a persistent wage gap between men and women.
Soon after taking office, he convened a national task force to address the issue, requesting greater coordination among agencies and more aggressive enforcement efforts.
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Despite those efforts, across all professions, women earn about 79 cents for every dollar earned by men-only 2 cents greater than when Mr. Obama took office.
Research shows women's lower earnings stem in part from interrupting their careers to care for children, or sometimes gravitating toward lower-paying jobs. But economists say that still doesn't account for the entire gap.
The EEOC currently collects demographic information annually about companies' workforces, including data on the race and gender of employees.
EEOC Chair Jenny Yang said she expects the administrative burden of gathering compensation data to be relatively light, since employers will essentially be adding a few columns to the report they already file.
Statisticians and economists note, however, that analyzing wage disparities is a complex undertaking, and that aggregating data about many occupations is especially tricky.
"You can't compare apples and oranges in the same group and draw meaningful conclusions," said David Cohen, president of DCI Consulting Group, a Washington, D.C., firm that conducts pay-equity analyses for companies. "You're going to get too many false positives and too many false negatives."
In a 2012 report commissioned by the EEOC to study the feasibility of collecting pay data, independent experts found that the agency at that time didn't have the expertise it needed to analyze the information it hoped to gather from employers.
Ms. Yang said Thursday that the EEOC has been working to increase its capacity. She also said the agency is joining with the Department of Labor to accomplish the aims of the program.
"One of the benefits of us partnering with DOL in this effort is we can join our capacity together in analyzing some of the data and sharing information and resources."
Ms. Yang said she anticipates completing the rule-making process by September 2016, with employers submitting their pay data for the first time in September 2017.
In 2014, the Labor Department began an effort to require federal contractors submit wage data to the federal government based on gender and race. The current proposal replaces that plan, the White House said.