Yesterday, we celebrated the launch of an open innovation initiative to eliminate the gender gap in pay. Working together with the National Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force, we commenced the “Equal Pay App Challenge” – a national competition to develop software applications, or “apps,” that leverage public data to promote equal pay for men and women.
Last Tuesday in his State of the Union address, President Obama recognized that “an economy built to last is one where we encourage the talent and ingenuity of every person in this country.” “That,” the President emphasized, “means women should earn equal pay for equal work.”
In America, women make up half of the workforce and two-thirds of our families rely on a mother’s wages for a significant portion of their income. Yet, women, on average, make less on the dollar than men, and the gap is even greater for women of color and women with disabilities. Lower pay not only means less economic security for women, but also for the families that depend on them.
The President is committed to closing the pay gap once and for all. The first bill he signed into law, the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, helps women who were victims of pay discrimination recover their wages. The President then created an inter-agency Equal Pay Enforcement Task Force to crack down on equal pay law violations. And yesterday’s announcement is yet another way the administration is working to accomplish this goal.
The Equal Pay App Challenge calls on developers to incorporate publicly available data and resources to create innovative, easy-to-use apps that educate users about the pay gap and provide tools to combat it. By encouraging developers to help us solve this problem, we’re leveraging the unique ability of the federal government to provide mountains of valuable data as well as the innovation power of the private sector.
We’ve successfully done this before – to help veterans transition to civilian employment, we celebrated “Apps for Heroes”; to empower women we celebrated “Apps Against Abuse”; and to improve childhood nutrition, we celebrated “Apps for Healthy Kids.”
Now, for The Equal Pay App Challenge, we’ve designed it to:
- Increase access to pay data aggregated by gender, race, and ethnicity through tools that can help women throughout their careers as they negotiate starting pay, request a promotion or a raise, or consider switching fields to a more lucrative career path.
- Provide interactive tools for early career coaching to educate young women on the pay gap and enable informed decision-making when selecting a career path.
- Help inform negotiations by providing feedback and tips that guide women through the process of negotiating starting salary, pay rate, job level, or requesting a promotion or raise.
- Promote online mentoring by providing a means to connect with others in broader communities.
Achieving equal pay for women is not just the right thing to do – it is vital to strengthening our country’s economic forecast. In launching the app challenge, we are proud to enlist new partners in this critical effort and take a significant step forward in closing the gender pay gap.
Additional information and submission guidelines for the Equal Pay App Challenge are available at http://equalpay.challenge.gov. The winner of the challenge will be announced in April.
Aneesh Chopra is the United States Chief Technology Officer.
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Your correct Ms Solis,Women should recieve equal pay as men.Your right about how families depend on the women who are working to support there family in these tough economic times.This is the case in our family right now.But i guess you already know that Ms Solis from reading all my other posts in the DOL” work in progress” blog comment sections.
I’m up at 5:00am every morning and have coffee and breakfast ready for my wife Ms Solis,you can’t imagine the anger i have in me watching her go out to work when it should be me.What did i do to deserve this Ms Solis?
Gregg
PROUD NAVY DAD
Good idea to empower women with information. I hope you will also consider re-entry internships, which could greatly help women’s careers. Many women take time off to raise small children, and re-entry takes too much time and sets women’s careers back much farther than it should. I am particularly concerned with STEM career re-entrants, and hope that you two can work to implement STEM career re-entry internships. In the U.S. and many other countries, it is not possible to get an internship if you are not a student. A re-entry internship is something we wish existed in the U.S.! A lot of re-entry tech workers would be happy to work for intern wages temporarily, in order to update skills and quickly return to a tech career. Interestingly, there are many scholarship programs for women to get STEM degrees, but then when women do the common thing of taking time off with young children, there isn’t any program to help re-entry to STEM fields. This affects everyone, because when tech re-entrants can’t find jobs, money spent on their education is less productive. The U.S. has visa programs for international technical workers because there aren’t enough qualified U.S. workers in STEM fields… but with a short re-entry internship, U.S. workers could become highly qualified again. (The Daphne Jackson program in the United Kingdom is a good model. It helps professionals in STEM fields to re-enter their careers after at least a 2-year break, through paid fellowships that include research and retraining. However, it is limited to residents of the U.K.) Please see https://sites.google.com/site/techcareerreentry/wishlist for more discussion on the topic.
What happened to my suggestion of a OSHA whistleblower protection program warning APP Ms Solis? Remember we could call it “Hear no evil, see no evil ,Speak no evil “OSHA 11(c) warning APP. Don’t you think this would be a good idea?
Lets face it Ms Solis you know right well OSHA is poor at best at protecting whistleblowers.Would this help workers make the right choice about coming forward if they uncover safety problems at there place of employment,YOU BET!
Remember what those five Deepwater Horizon survivors said about BP on CNN, ‘You could call time out for safety,they wouldn’t fire you for it but they would find another way to fire you for it ”
How about that Upperbranch mine disaster and what the DOL investigation uncovered where management created a culture of intimidation and kept a second set of books on safety problems that they knew about.
These disasters were under your watch Ms Solis,right?
Remember Ms Solis how my employer kept a second set where we were to write up any repairs or pending problems on what was called a whit sheet ? This was a single sheet of paper and the customer never viewed or recived.
When i first started at this employer i wrote what repairs i performed and what was pending on both the check for rent document and the whitesheet.Then the branch manager took the check for rent documents and tore them up in front of me and had me rewrite them with no mention of repairs or pending problems.
So heres the real kicker Ms Solis,This employer stated “in writeing” on the day i was fired that i wrote no repairs or pending problems on the check for rent documents and this was a safety violation. All of the mechanics were instructed not to write any repairs or pending problems on the check for rent document NEVER!
And we never did!!!!
This was company policy Ms Solis! Do you understand this Ms Solis?
Do you see anything wrong here Ms Solis?
This is just one small part of what “we” provided OSHA Ms Solis!!!
Do you see any retaliation for protected activity here Ms Solis???
This whistleblower warning App should have been up and running by now Ms Solis!
( GOT MERIT ? )
How about my work history at my former employer that i provided Ms Solis?
Like how i went from third class mechanic to first in three years,How about the vise president of the company asked me to go for management testing,my response to him ” I don’t know andrew,I don’t have a college education and i don’t think i’m management material”His reply “No i think you do have what it takes,We have been watching you”.So i went and let me tell you Ms Solis ,with that kind of math testing i thought i gave birth to an accountant.I was one of two people picked for this Ms Solis.
How about how i traveled for this employer assisting other branches?
How about when i recived another job offer from a competitor company when i gave notice i was leaving they begged me to reconcider and let them call corparate to counter the offer?They did counter offer and i did stay.
What about all the overtime i worked for them where i would come in early or stay late when asked.Belivem me i didn’t have too work overtime but i would always step up .
How about the picture that they used of me in there company brochure?
How about them sending me to Houston ,Texas twice to assist opening a new branch there?
All this with documentation given to DOL/OSHA.
Why am i bringing this up Ms Solis,well let me tell you what else my former employer stated about me at the time of my termination for protected activity,they said “my honesty and integrity were in doubt!” With what i showed you above does this show how i was dishonest or my integrity were in doubt?
They even tried to portray me as lazy Ms Solis.Do you think my work history shows that Ms Solis?
There was even more that i provided DOL/OSHA on my record.
Do you see any reasonable cause here Ms Solis?
( GOT MERIT ? )
This issue of equality will not be such an issue if we dwell on what we think is not equal. Sometimes the fight for equality only exude an impression that we are trying to cover-up our weaknesses.
I think that at present level of social development of society a gap in a salary not possibly to overcome as people will always want to receive for difficult work more.