Ivanka Trump Supports Her Dad's Choice to Block Equal Pay Legislation
The Trump administration is doing away with an Obama-era initiative to close the gender wage gap—and Ivanka Trump is okay with it.
To hold employers accountable for promoting equal pay, former President Barack Obama created a rule requiring them to release salary data categorized by gender and race. It was set to go into effect in spring 2018—but now, thanks to the Trump administration, it never will.
Obama’s rule was “enormously burdensome,” Neomi Rao, administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, told the Wall Street Journal. “We don’t believe it would actually help us gather information about wage and employment discrimination.” As a result, the Trump administration decided to block it.
Some wondered what Ivanka Trump, who serves as her father’s adviser, might have to say about this—given that she’s made wage equality one of her causes. On Equal Pay Day, she wrote on Facebook that “closing the gender pay gap is critical to the economic empowerment of American women,” and that she would “work towards this goal alongside my father.” And when she announced her global Women Entrepreneurs Fund, she cited combating the wage gap as one of her goals.
But Ivanka has been criticized for paying lip service to gender equality without doing much to further it. She’s stayed silent on her father’s decisions to cut funding for women’s healthcare and remove other Obama-era legislation to protect women in the workplace. In fact, she told the Washington Post that she tries not to give her dad her opinion at all. Her book, Women Who Work, claimed to help women get ahead in the workplace—but it was widely denounced as relevant only to a privileged few.
So it’s perhaps no surprise that Ivanka is standing by her father, as usual. “Ultimately, while I believe the intention was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results,” she said in a statement to The Wall Street Journal. “We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap.”
The Anne Frank Center—among others on Twitter—have called her out for this statement, using it as further proof that she’s mostly talk and little action when it comes to gender equality.
https://twitter.com/AnneFrankCenter/status/902877977301721088