Wage Disparities and Racial Discrimination v.2016
Some things are important to get right. Actually, it would be better-stated to say some things are too important to continually get wrong. After decades of anti-discrimination policy the wage gap between white workers and black workers is not getting better. The current trend is that the gap is growing.
Some of my past experiences with hiring policy worked along these lines: initiate policies and once in place, hopefully, they will be effective. In the absence of a complaint there was no way to know whether these efforts were working or just ineffectually idling away in the background. Safeguards against discrimination are often treated this way. The EEOC is proposing that employers report a breakdown of their worker's pay by race, ethnicity, and gender. Is this necessary?
No matter how you measure it people of color are paid less than their white coworkers. A recent Economic Policy Institute study found that after accounting for all other factors (aside from discrimination) the wage gap persists. The key finding is, when you take all other factors into account, such as education and experience, the pay disparities exist, but are unexplained.
The point is this: when a company sets forth policies to lessen the potential for discrimination, the results are rarely evident within the currently-being-collected data. You do not see a result. Anti-discrimination policies are merely good intentions unless they are effective and the practice of hiring more people of color, alone, does not solve the problem. The EEOC may be on the right track here. A recent article by Gene Demby of NPR's Code Switch (see article) encapsulates this well.
The EEOC proposal requires that the pay data be reported by September 30, 2017. While private employers with 99 or fewer employees would be exempt from adding pay data to an EEO-1 filing, it would be useful internal information for smaller businesses.
However well-intentioned your company policies, if your numbers are off, the effectiveness of your anti-discrimination practices may be off as well.
The EEOC fact sheet for the proposal is available here: Notice of Proposed Changes to the EEO-1 Report to Collect Pay Data from Certain Employers
