GAMADES: President Obama starts fight on gender pay gap

The Obama administration rolled out new plans for easing the gender wage gap Friday. They proposed executive action, announced on the seventh anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, would require companies with more than 100 employees to report their employees’ wages, broken down into categories like race and gender, to the federal government. President Barack Obama is also encouraging Congress (we’ll see how that goes) to pass the Paycheck Fairness Act — a measure that would bolster the Equal Pay Act of 1963.

These sound like good ideas, but will they work? The wage gap is more complicated than any one set of factors, so it’s hard to tell just how much any individual act can do. Pay transparency has become an increasingly popular step, from private companies beginning to disclose their numbers publicly, to Bradley Cooper encouraging male actors to share their pay numbers with their female co-stars. It’s a good way to get the conversation going, but a lot of it just confirms what we already know.

Without looking at the numbers that would be disclosed from President Obama’s executive action, we already know that women get paid less than men across the spectrum. There is hard data that doesn’t go away when adjusting for outside factors. The wage gap is real, and it generally increases for women of color.

Sometimes women are paid less because they don’t work in higher-paying science, technology, engineering and math fields, but the blame to place there is probably on the fact that girls are discouraged from an early age to work in those fields. And if women do make it their career choice, they face an egregious amount of sexual harassment in the workplace.

Sometimes women are paid less because if they want to be a mother, they have to pick a flexible job, thanks to the United States’ lack of universal child care and paid maternity leave. These are deep-rooted issues that require a bigger fix than what one law can do.

The aspect of unequal pay that can be fixed by pay disclosure to the federal government is the difference in pay negotiations between men and women. According to studies done by Hannah Bowles, a public policy professor at Harvard University, men are more likely to negotiate salaries than women.

And when women do negotiate, they often request about 30 percent lower increases than men. These statistics raise more questions about culture and the socialization of boys to be assertive and girls to be nice, but at least if employees were given definite numbers, it could empower women ask for the pay they deserve.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was supposed to abolish wage disparity based on sex, but here we are more than 50 years later with a problem that still persists despite multiple measures to fix it. Granted, there’s still a lot of pushback with this issue, with many people denying the gap exists at all.

Whether it’s a wealthy white woman denying the existence of a gap because of her own personal scraping-together of the data, or those boys I once heard in the George Sherman Union dismissing Jennifer Lawrence’s letter on pay inequality as an issue of a bad agent — not her gender — the wage gap receives a hearty share of skepticism.

Despite pushback and feet dragging, there have been some pay transparency success stories. According to The New York Times, Salesforce.com Chief Executive Marc Benioff ordered an internal review of fair pay after a request from a number of female employees. Despite his own skepticism, he ended up adding $3 million to the payroll to address the inequalities.

There are a lot of issues to combat here, but at least this step from the Obama administration might get the ball rolling for cooperation between bosses and their employees. Or, at the very least, give workers the data they need to fight for equitable treatment.