Pay data released recently from the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission dates back to 2017-2018. The data reveals enduring, systemic wage disparities in the US workforce. The commission’s public release of this information sets a framework for ongoing awareness and measurement of pay discrimination within the country.
The EEOC’s data dashboard, reveals information on pay collected from many types of US employers. This data is aggregated by sex, race, and ethnicity. The EEOC gathered this information from roughly 70,000 employers each collection year, covering a large portion of the US workforce.
EEOC’s Chair, Charlotte Burrows, emphasized that sharing this aggregated data demonstrates the significance of collecting pay data in exposing discriminatory practices and potential solutions.
The data available for analysis is limited to the two-year period as a result of the short-live EEOC’s Component-2 data collection. This requirement came into effect in 2016 and demanded employers to provide specific pay data alongside demographic details. This initiative was later halted under the Trump administration and then dropped once a Republican-majority assumed control over the commission.
A challenge in federal court argued that the stay was imposed arbitrarily. The order that ensued saw the EEOC resume its collection for the two years before the new regulation was entirely abandoned.
The dashboard feature, which has been made publicly available for the first time, allows easy access to the sort and visualize the Component-2 data. However, it only presents this data in an aggregated form to ensure the confidentiality of both employees and employers.
Usage of such aggregated statistics to draw conclusions about discriminatory practice has garnered controversy. Courts often dismiss lawsuits that lean on statistics that can’t account for the varying degrees of employee differences. These aggregated data sets often gloss over such distinctions, making it challenging to identify existing disparities.
The EEOC has identified that the lack of access to pay data has been a persistent barrier to its efforts in enforcing federal anti-pay discrimination statutes. It’s fundamental to note that EEOC has an in-depth look at this information at an individual employer level, not merely the aggregated statistics that are available to the public.
Employers are recommended to review the dashboard to mitigate any potential risk of EEOC litigation based on their industry, state, or the type of workers they employ.
Though this data may be too broad to craft a case against a specific employer, plaintiffs’ lawyers have been known to combine such statistics to amplify their arguments on the widespread inequality within a particular industry or job category.
This article was written by Matthew Gagnon, a labor and employment partner at Seyfarth Shaw.