The Patriot Post® · Trump Nixes Obama's Onerous Gender Wage Gap Regs

Identity politics is the bedrock of leftist politicians. They seek to gain office by feeding the masses the poison of class-envy wrapped up in the guise of “social justice.” It inevitably produces only tribalism and class-warfare. Under Barak Obama, the nation suffered under an onslaught of this costly divisiveness. One particular example is an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) regulation set to go into effect that requires all business with at least 100 employees to report 3,660 data points on each employee and their pay structure. Ostensibly designed to close the supposed “gender wage gap.”

On Tuesday, Donald Trump, via the Office of Management and Budget, instructed the EEOC to shelve the onerous regulation over concerns that it was “unnecessarily burdensome” and that it lacked adequate privacy protections. The regulation would have impacted over 61,000 American companies, costing them hundreds of millions in compliance costs as well as millions of man hours each year. The fact is employers already have to submit data to the government on employee race and gender.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-TN) commended Trump’s decision stating, “This agency [EEOC] is supposed to be protecting American workers from discrimination. Instead the EEOC came up with an absurd mandate forcing employers to submit new pay data on 63 million private sector employees. The Trump administration has done the right thing today so EEOC can think critically about what data it should require of employers and begin to work through its backlog of more than 73,000 unresolved complaints of discrimination.”

The gender wage gap myth is a classic example of misinterpreted and misrepresented stats. As The Daily Signal reports, “When accounting for measurable, relevant factors, the statistical pay gap between men and women all but disappears. And because current research has limitations in what factors are included, any remaining gap should not simply be interpreted as reflecting discrimination.”

The irony is that these Obama-era regulations would actually hurt those they are intended to help, creating fewer job prospects for all workers by imposing more limiting and costly regulations onto smaller businesses. This was a good decision by Trump that will help business and employees all across the nation.