Despite her supposed support for equal pay, Ivanka Trump backed a recent White House decision to end an Obama administration rule that would have required businesses to monitor the salaries of employees of different genders, races, and ethnicities in an effort to prevent employment discrimination.
Ivanka said in a statement that the policy, which would have taken effect this spring, would “not yield the intended results.” She didn’t offer any alternatives to replace the policy or explain why monitoring employees’ salaries would not help close wage gaps.
Ivanka has made a brand out of praising women who work, selling herself as an advocate for women’s rights.In April, Ivanka praised similar legislation passed in Germany requiring companies with 200 or more workers to document pay gaps between employees. She even added that the United States should follow Germany’s example.
“I know that Chancellor Merkel, just this past March, you passed an equal pay legislation to promote transparency and to try to finally narrow that gender pay gap,” she said. “And that’s something we should all be looking at.”
The Obama-era rule would have required companies with 100 or more workers to collect and submit data on employee wages to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told The Wall Street Journal that the policy is “enormously burdensome…We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.”
The recent move to end the employment discrimination rule is only the latest in a series of failures by Ivanka to stand up for what she claims to be right.
Ivanka — an official White House advisor — has long been regarded as a potential moderating force within the Trump administration. But that image is carefully crafted, through a series of anonymous anecdotes to the media and sound bites that don’t actually fall in line with her father’s policies.
When Trump began the process of rolling back Obama-era clean water regulations just one month into his presidency, Ivanka remained silent. Ivanka also reportedly opposed the United States withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, but she failed to stop her father from backing out of the deal. In June, in honor of Pride Month, she tweeted that she was “proud to support my LGBTQ friends and the LGBTQ Americans who have made immense contributions to our society and economy.” She then stayed silent when her father announced he would ban transgender Americans from serving in the military. (She also hasn’t said anything about the administration’s rollback of protections for transgender students.)
In her recent book, Women Who Work, Ivanka repeatedly touts her lifelong mission as, “Inspiring and empowering women who work — at all aspects of their lives.” But she remained silent on the shortcomings of her father’s paid family leave plan, which would offer six weeks of paid maternity leave to mothers, leaving out fathers and adoptive parents and potentially creating career obstacles for the working women she claims to support.
Wage discrimination in the United States is a serious problem. While the national gender pay gap has decreased since 1980, it still stands at a whopping 17 percent, with women making 83 percent of what men earn. The racial pay gap lags closely behind. In 2015, black workers earned 75 percent as much as white workers, according to Pew Research. The racial disparity is worse for women, who also fall behind men within their own racial or ethnic group.
Inside the White House, there is a surging pay gap, the highest of any White House since 2003, according to the Washington Post. At 37 percent, the White House pay gap is more than double the national gender gap.
This blog was originally published at ThinkProgress on August 30, 2017. Reprinted with permission.
About the Author: Elham Khatami is an associate editor at ThinkProgress. Previously, she worked as a grassroots organizer within the Iranian-American community. She also served as research manager, editor, and reporter during her five-year career at CQ Roll Call. Elham earned her Master of Arts in Global Communication at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs and her bachelor’s degree in writing and political science at the University of Pittsburgh.
