NPR: It’s Equal Pay Day. Women have lost ground for the second year in a row

March 26. 2026

Deborah Vagins, ERA National Campaigns Director and Director of Equal Pay Today, was interviewed by NPR today for Equal Pay Day.

“We are reversing decades of hard won progress,” Vagins says. …

Under the Obama administration, Vagins worked at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she helped to push through a requirement that employers submit pay data, broken down by sex, ethnicity and race, to the government.

“That data collection showed there [were] still vast pay disparities by occupation, that occupational segregation remained extremely high for certain fields,” she says.

Two years in, the first Trump administration stopped the initiative, citing its burden to employers. Now, the coalition is hoping for a changeover in Congress to revive the effort.

“If you can’t measure what’s going on, you can’t fix it,” says Vagins. …

Vagins says wage gaps affect women throughout their entire lives, translating into less savings for retirement, smaller social security checks, and limits on women’s ability to create generational wealth for their kids and grandkids.

“It has very, very long-lasting impacts,” she says.

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