SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Large companies in California could be required to publicly disclose how much they pay their employees. In addition to the disclosure, they would also need to break it down based on gender, race, and ethnicity. Legislators said society can’t help fix a problem if they can’t see it.
"Women are still just paid $0.83 (nationally) for every dollar paid to a man when you're looking at workers working full-time, year-round," said Jessica Mason, policy director at the National Partnership for Women and Families.
California is doing better at $0.88 on the dollar, but for women of color, she said the numbers balloon.
“For Latina women over the course of the year, they're paid more than $33,000 less than white non-Hispanic men working full-time, year-round," Mason said. "That's a huge, huge hit.”
It’s why state Senator Monique Limon wrote a bill that requires companies with more than 100 employees to publicly disclose how much they’re paying employees and to break it down by gender, race and ethnicity.
"It's about closing and addressing a monumental billion-dollar problem in our state, which is the gender and racial pay gap," Limon said. "And so for purposes of advancing women and people of color, we hope that businesses will come to the table to identify how they can all be more transparent.”
She expects opposition from the business community.
“If you're doing everything right, you have nothing to be afraid of out there," Asm. Cristina Garcia said. "If you're not, this is the opportunity to hurry up and change your practices so that we are no longer cheating out half of the population."
Assemblywoman Cristina Garcia, chair of the women's caucus, is co-authoring the bill.
“If the data is not public, then we can't fix what we don't know,” Garcia said.
Jessica Stender, policy director at Equal Rights Advocates, said in places like the U.K. where they have public reporting requirements, they've seen the wage gap decrease.
The bill also requires businesses to disclose pay ranges to job applicants.
"We know studies show that women, in particular, are less likely to negotiate higher pay for themselves. But when they are armed with more information about the potential pay range for a position, they're more likely to negotiate a higher pay critical to themselves," she said.
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