On the seventh anniversary of the first piece of legislation signed into law by US President Obama, the White House has announced a series of  steps designed to promote work place diversity and equality.

According to a briefing produced to the Council of Economic Advisors, the U.S. gender pay gap is currently larger than that of many other industrialized nations. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the gender wage gap in the United States is about 2.5 percentage points larger than the OECD average. For comparison, the gender wage gap in New Zealand is less than a third of what it is in the United States. In Norway, it is 11 percentage points less than it is in the United States, and in Italy it is 7 percentage points lower.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) and Department of Labor, have now published proposals to annually collect summary pay data by gender, race, and ethnicity from businesses with 100 or more employees. The proposal would apply to firms with 100 or more employees to cover 63 million employees or 40$ of the US civilian workforce. The US proposals go beyond the plan announced in November 2015 to require companies and public sector bodies with more than 250 employees to publish the differences between average pay and bonuses of male and female workers.

Download the briefing here [link] >>

Download the disclosure proposals here [link] >>

Last Updated: 29 January 2016