“That understanding is at the heart of the equal pay enforcement program at the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs. And over the past 4 years we’ve made good progress. We have implemented many recommendations of President Obama’s Equal Pay Task Force. We have eliminated outdated guidance that posed barriers to the agency’s enforcement work. And we have recovered back pay for workers, many of whom did not even know that they were being unfairly underpaid until we reviewed their workplaces.

“Since the president established the Equal Pay Task Force in January 2010, the OFCCP has resolved over 90 cases of pay discrimination and recovered approximately $3.3 million in back wages and salary adjustments for more than 1,400 workers. About one-third of our successful settlements now involve issues of pay discrimination, while in prior years the agency was only addressing a handful of such cases annually.

“I’m proud of the accomplishments my staff has made in this area, but we still have work to do. We have just begun to implement our new investigative guidance. We are also on the verge of completing a national training program for all OFCCP investigators. I expect that over the next year this more robust and effective approach will improve our ability to identify systemic pay discrimination, which under the old guidance was a relatively small component of our enforcement work.

“We have also committed to providing more compliance assistance tools to make it easier for employers to proactively review their pay practices, and ensure fair and equitable compensation for all their workers.”