Women already earn less. Trump's labor cuts could make the pay gap easier to hide.

Yahoo

25-03-2025

The federal government employed around 3 million people last year. But by next year's Equal Pay Day, progress on wage transparency and equity could drop dramatically for the country's largest employers — a warning sign for the rest of the nation's private sector workers.
Tuesday's Equal Pay Day, meant to highlight wage inequality across gender and race, falls during an unprecedented period of governmental upheaval. Between unprecedented mass layoffs, President Donald Trump's reshaping of labor boards, and a targeted backlash to diversity advancements, many gains made among the federal workforce could disappear, experts say.
'It's not unusual to have different emphases across Republican and Democratic administrations, different levels of enforcement,' said Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families, a national nonpartisan organization that advocates for family policy. 'What's different this time around, unlike the first Trump administration and [any other] since [former President Lyndon B.] Johnson's administration, they have sought to eliminate the underlying executive actions and infrastructure that is critical to doing robust enforcement.'
During Trump's first term, he directed the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a labor board dedicated to investigating discrimination charges, to stop collecting pay data on race and gender from large companies — which a federal judge overruled soon after. He also rolled back the Fair Pay and Safe Workplaces executive order, which required federal contractors to comply with 14 labor and civil rights laws, including a paycheck transparency rule.
Trump's latest attempts to reshape and freeze agencies like the EEOC and National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), which handles unionization processes, are yet another step away from addressing wage discrimination complaints from the nation's workforce.
'If you don't have the ability to track or try to prove or enforce non-discrimination laws, that's going to be worse,' said Elise Gould, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a left-leaning think tank. 'Those [cuts] are hugely detrimental. They're going in the wrong direction.'
The so-called Department of Government Efficiency, billionaire Elon Musk's cost-cutting effort, has fired an estimated 32,000 employees so far, in addition to the 75,000 who have taken deferred buyouts. The group has not published any comprehensive data about those who have been dismissed, including their gender or race.
Coupled with mass layoffs is the administration's move to aggressively weed out diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in the federal government, including firings of high-profile women, Democrats and people of color. This could squash any future conversations about pay equity under this White House, said Kelly Dittmar, director of research for the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University. The arguments to address inequalities are about systemic changes, rather than individual cases — a theme the current administration has been pushing back on for months, she added.
'There's no expectation that they would prioritize this issue. They haven't before,' Dittmar said. 'There's very little pressure from their base to do so. And in the current climate, which I do think is even different than the first [term]… they're doubling down on [a backlash to diversity] for a whole host of reasons.'
While data is not yet available for Trump's current staff, women working under his first year in office earned 69 cents to every $1 a man made, wider than the national wage gap at the time of 82 cents per dollar. His first term saw an estimated 37 percent pay gap among staffers, per the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank — a large jump from the last year of former President Barack Obama's administration, which was estimated to be somewhere under 20 percent.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about any current or future policies concerning wage equality. Congress requires the administration to publicly share salary information annually on July 1.
Former President Joe Biden got closer to narrowing the gap, particularly toward the end of his term, with a $93,752 average salary for women compared to $94,639 for men. His administration's efforts to combat inequality included raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour in 2022 for 370,000 federal employees and contractors. He also issued a new rule that barred more than 80 federal agencies from considering workers' current or past pay in setting their salaries, a practice that has suppressed wages for women by carrying inequities from one job to the next.
Women comprised around 56 percent of Biden's senior staff, an increase from Obama and Trump's administrations. Women are already less likely to be Republican, and fewer conservative women work in politics, furthering the current administration's potential divide, Dittmar said.
Government jobs have traditionally had more transparency in wage gaps compared to the private sector, Dittmar said, with clearer guidelines about seniority and salaries. Addressing the inequities at the federal level has the additional benefit of giving other industries clues and examples of progress, she said.
And the recent tampering with labor board functions sends a very different message to the private sector than previous administrations, Frye said: Nobody is monitoring business practices.
'Nobody is watching, and nobody is paying attention to whether or not you're discriminating,' Frye said. 'It's hard to say what exactly the private sector pay practices will look like because nobody is going to be scrutinizing it terribly closely. And they know that, and we know that.'
Equal Pay Day has traditionally been held on the symbolic day a woman would have to work to have earned as much as a White man during just the prior year. Wage gaps across the country have decreased between men and women of all races, according to data from the Economic Policy Institute. In 2024, women were paid 18 percent less on average than men, controlling for all factors.
For every White man who earned $1 in 2023, Black women earned 64 cents, Latina women earned 51 cents, Native American women earned 52 cents, and AAPI women earned 82 cents, according to the National Partnership for Women and Families.
The progress after the pandemic shutdown years showcased a tight labor market, according to Gould. This is likely to change over the next year based on the recent waves of federal layoffs and future job insecurity. When unemployment is low, companies have less discretion in hiring, and are more likely to make their offers competitive to entice workers, she said.
But a potential incoming recession means historically disadvantaged workers get hurt first, Gould added.
'The economic uncertainty that's being shown right now, whether it has to do with deportations or tariffs or all the playoffs at the federal level that are trickling through contractors and into the private sector, that's going to have a huge impact,' she said.
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