The Trump administration halted a key equal pay initiative... put in place by the Obama administration... requir[ing] employers to report aggregate information on how much they pay workers ― broken down by gender, race and ethnicity ― [which] would have been a critical first step in figuring out the scope of the pay gap at different companies. Instead, the Office of Management and Budget said in a memo... that it was halting implementation so it could review the provision, citing concerns about paperwork and privacy... “[This] spits in the eye of gender equality and in the eyes of women and people of color who are so often paid less and do not know,” [according to Vicki Shabo, vice president for workplace policy and strategy at the National Partnership for Women and Families.]... Starting a few years ago, tech companies have made their Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reports public, which has led to a painful ― but fruitful ― discussion about the lack of women in the tech industry... “Having pay data in summary form will help us identify patterns that may warrant further investigation,” the former chairwoman of the EEOC said last year. In the past, she said, “we’d learn about a pay-discrimination problem because someone saw a piece of paper left on a copy machine or someone was complaining about their salary to co-workers.”... Most employers were already preparing to file this data, according to Shabo. Indeed, in recent years, activist shareholders have been pressuring public companies to report data ― a few companies, including Apple and Amazon, have started opening up about gender and pay... Stopping the Obama administration provision from going into effect was the result of an orchestrated effort by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the federal contractors business lobby and anti-worker and anti-regulatory senators on the Hill, Shabo said. It’s even more disappointing because the provision already represented a compromised effort, she added. “It wasn’t as comprehensive or as detailed as we would’ve liked. This was something that was put together with the ease and efficiency of the employer community in mind.”