One Effort to Close the Gender Pay Gap Won’t Get a Try<br />Asian women earn 87 percent of what white men earn, while black women earn 65 percent and Hispanic women earn 58 percent.<br />Get the Upshot in your Inbox<br />The Obama administration had an idea it thought would help address the pay gap between white men<br />and almost everyone else: requiring companies to report how much they paid people, along with their sex and race.<br />Black and Hispanic men also earn less than white men, while Asian men out-earn them.<br />Researchers who have studied the few instances in which companies have publicly disclosed individual salaries say it is not enough<br />to close pay gaps, nor is it essential — some companies have closed them on their own, without publicly reporting pay information.<br />The Obama regulation required that employers with at least 100 workers include aggregate, anonymous information about<br />pay for categories of employees, on a form they already submit with information on sex, race and ethnicity.<br />White women’s median hourly earnings are 82 percent of those of white men, according<br />to a Pew Research Center analysis of Bureau of Labor statistics data.<br />“Part of the motivation behind it would be to shame certain employers<br />that found large gaps into doing something and taking proactive steps,” said Jake Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Washington University in St. Louis who has studied the issue.
