“The gender wage gap has not changed in a statistically significant way for over a decade,” Jessica Stender of Equal Rights Advocates testified at a recent hearing on the EEOC proposal in Washington, D.C. “It is therefore critical that the agencies charged with enforcing equal pay and antidiscrimination laws are able to take proactive steps to identify and better address pay discrimination.”

The Trump administration’s concern about the supposed burden on employers of having to collect income information pales in comparison to the burden on workers of a lifetime income loss totaling $1 million or more. A recent study by the nonprofit Institute for Women’s Policy Research showed that equal pay would cut poverty rates among working women and their families by more than half.

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