Obama: More to do to close the pay gap for women, minorities

Friday’s announcement was timed to coincide with the seventh anniversary of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first piece of legislation signed by Obama upon taking office in 2009.

“We’re never going to solve this issue of pay inequality if CEOs like myself and others continue to turn a blind eye to what’s happening in their own corporations”, Benioff said in a conference call organized by the White House, adding that he was spending $3 million to close the pay gap at his firm.

US President Barack Obama has issued a proposal that would require private businesses to submit more data about how their employees are paid, broken down by gender, race and ethnicity. The action, the White House said, is meant to “advance equal pay for all workers and to further empower working families”.

The proposed rule expands on a previously published rule by the Department of Labor, which would have applied only to federal contractors.

The White House also plans to host a summit called “The United State of Women” in May.

The US gender pay gap has narrowed slightly in recent years, but remains significant.

Lilly Ledbetter, the namesake of the law signed seven years ago, introduced Obama on Friday and praised him for “not resting on his Ledbetter laurels”. The law, which extends the statute of limitations for filing pay discrimination lawsuits, was named for Ledbetter, a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant who found out through an anonymous note that her male colleagues had been making substantially more than her for decades.

According to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, women make up nearly half of the workforce, are the main breadwinner in four out of 10 families and receive more college and graduate degrees than men, but make only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men. The change is supposed to give the government more leverage to crack down on companies that engage in discriminatory pay practices and encourage them, by virtue of the fact that they’re being monitored, to police themselves to correct existing disparities.

“I may have lost my personal battle, but I will not lose this war”, Ledbetter said Friday.