What the EEO-1 Equal Pay Data Collection Tells Us About Ivanka’s Inch-Deep Feminism

Yesterday, the Trump Administration put a halt to the EEO-1 equal pay data collection, an initiative requiring large companies to confidentially report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) information about what they pay their employees by job category, sex, race, and ethnicity. By initiating a “review and immediate stay,” this Administration has sought to quietly kill (via indefinitely stalling) an initiative that would have encouraged companies to identify and correct pay disparities. This also takes away a critically important tool from the EEOC that would have been used to more effectively find and address pay discrimination.
What does that have to do with Ivanka Trump?
Ivanka has been a long time self-styled advocate for equal pay. She mentioned it in her Republican National Convention Speech, stating, “Politicians talk about wage equality, but my father has made it a practice at his company throughout his entire career. He will fight for equal pay for equal work, and I will fight for this too, right alongside of him.” She also Tweeted about it this April, once her father was President. She wrote a book called Women Who Work, and purports to care about the experience of women in the workplace, at least if they are affluent enough to wrestle with problems that she vaguely recognizes from her own life.

Equal pay for women seems to be one of the few issues Ivanka has consistently staked her claim on. If you took her at her word, Ivanka was going to use her position as an advisor in her father’s White House to advocate for women.

Ivanka must have been horrified at this step backward for equal pay, then, right? What did she do to try to stop this?
Well…that’s not quite what happened. When the rollback of the EEO-1 equal pay data collection was announced, Ivanka put out a statement in support of this decision by the Trump Administration’s Office of Management and Budget, stating that, “the proposed policy would not yield the intended results.” Of course, NWLC repeatedly requested to meet with OMB to talk about just this (we had no luck with that). Nor did Ivanka, the OMB, or anyone else in the Trump Administration put forward any suggestions for how they’d like to “fix” the equal pay data collection, or what alternative equal pay initiatives they would like to undertake. In fact, it seems like the primary intended results they’re looking to yield are helping corporations hide their wage gaps.

Wait, so Ivanka’s first policy move around equal pay was to support a move that helps large companies hide their wage gaps? The first equal pay policy Ivanka supported since working in the White House was against equal pay?

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