Intel Corp. says it will publicly release employee pay data, broken down by race and gender later this year.
For the first time, every company with more than 100 employees is required to report the same to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, but the agency keeps the filings private, unless a company voluntarily discloses it.
“The risk of releasing this information is backlash over the data not being where you want it to be,” Julie Ann Overcash, Intel’s vice president of human resources and director of compensation and benefits, said by email. “You must be willing to put yourself out there as a company that can withstand criticism to achieve real progress.”
In previous years, the EEOC only required companies submit data on the race and gender of their employees. By adding pay, the new disclosures provide a more granular analysis that could reveal pay gaps.
“Our hope is that more than one company will disclose this in the future,” said Alison Omens, a managing director at JUST Capital, a fund that pressures companies to disclose data on pay and diversity. If history is any guide, most will keep the data private.
Businesses were supposed to hand over the data by Sept. 30. As of Sept. 25, just over half of the required number of employers had pressed ‘Submit,’ according to the agency. The next update from the EEOC on company compliance is due Friday.
Full disclosure is “the gold standard,” said Omens, but JUST’s research found only 32 out of the 1,000 companies they track released their EEOC filings to the public last year. More transparency puts more pressure on companies to fix pay disparities, she said. “The first step is for companies to be leaders and be willing to talk about these issues publicly,” Omens said.
Omens hopes that Intel’s move will push others to follow, although none of the biggest banks and technology companies that have released the EEOC data in the past has said they will do so this year.
