Echoing President Obama’s call this past weekend for corporations with more than 100 employees to reveal how much they pay men, women, and minorities–an effort to improve pay equity by requiring pay transparency and accountability–city council freshman Lorena Gonzalez says she hopes to pass legislation this year that would require the city to follow suit.
Gonzalez, who added “gender equity” to the title of what’s traditionally been known as the Public Safety Committee (it now goes by the somewhat sprawling name “Gender Equity, Safe Communities, and New Americans Committee), says last year’s report on gender and racial pay inequities at the city raised concerns for her about how large the pay gap is and how well the city is keeping track of it. I covered the report last year, and argued that its sanguine conclusions about pay equity at the city were unjustified, given the hoops its authors jumped through to segregate male-dominated departments like fire and police from the city as a whole, and to gloss over the reasons women might be more likely to “choose” part-time work in an environment that doesn’t offer many options after pregnancy.
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Washington Work and Family Coalition 