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DeLauro Marks Equal Pay Day

April 10, 2018

WASHINGTON, DC (April 10, 2018) Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro today marked Equal Pay Day by calling on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to move forward with a revised regulation to collect equal pay data and reiterated the critical importance of closing the gender pay gap by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act—legislation she has introduced in every Congress since 1997. This legislation that would strengthen the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and guarantee that women can challenge pay discrimination and hold employers accountable.

"Equal Pay Day falls over four months into 2018, far too late for millions of American women and their families. Every year, I hope we never have to recognize this day, and though we have made some progress in closing the wage gap, it still exists for too many women," said DeLauro. "Women and men in the same job should have the same pay, and the Paycheck Fairness Act is a strong step forward in ensuring that we close the wage gap once and for all. This legislation addresses the issue in a comprehensive and sensible manner, and it is long overdue. President Trump campaigned on the promise that he would fight for American workers, including women, and I strongly encourage him to support this bill and make equal pay a reality."

"The Trump Administration's stay on collecting wage data from large companies via the EEO-1 form is a shameless attempt to dismantle a critical equal pay initiative. This is an attack on equal pay, plain and simple," continued DeLauro. "For over 50 years, companies have used the EEO-1 form to provide the EEOC with important employee demographic information, like sex, race, and ethnicity, by job category. The EEO-1 form was updated last year to ask large companies to start reporting information on what they pay their employees by sex, race, and ethnicity. This Equal Pay Data Collection is a critical tool that allows the EEOC to identify pay discrimination and encourage companies to correct pay disparities."

Equal Pay Day symbolizes the date when women's wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year. Despite making up half the workforce, more than five decades after the passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, American women still make only 80 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by a man. The gap is even wider for women of color, with African American women making 63 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic women making only 54 cents, on average, compared with white men.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would strengthen and close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act of 1963 by holding employers accountable for discriminatory practices, ending the practice of pay secrecy, easing workers' ability to individually or jointly challenge pay discrimination, and strengthening the available remedies for wronged employees. The House legislation has 198 cosponsors (every Democratic Member of the House and one Republican Member) and the Senate legislation has 41 cosponsors.

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