Ivanka Trump Proves Once Again She's No Champion for Women in the Workplace

This April on Equal Pay Day, Ivanka Trump, who purports to be a champion of women in the workplace, tweeted her support of closing the gender pay gap. "#EqualPayDay is a reminder that women deserve equal pay for equal work. We must work to close the gender pay gap!" she tweeted.

But now Trump, an adviser to her father, Donald Trump, has backed his administration's decision to halt implementation of a rule from President Barack Obama's era that required private businesses with 100 or more employees and federal contractors with 50 or more employees to submit pay data, making it easier to monitor how compensation differed by gender and race, according to Vanity Fair.

"Ultimately, while I believe the intention [of the Obama-era rule] was good and agree that pay transparency is important, the proposed policy would not yield the intended results," was Ivanka Trump's rather vague statement to The Wall Street Journal. "We look forward to continuing to work with EEOC, OMB, Congress and all relevant stakeholders on robust policies aimed at eliminating the gender wage gap."

Ivanka Trump has continually said that supporting women in the workplace is a priority. But like her stepmother, Melania Trump, who vowed to tackle online bullying even as her husband continues to torment women like Mika Brzezinski in deeply misogynistic tweets, the first daughter, who published Women Who Work: Rewriting the Rules for Success in May, has yet to put her money where her mouth and silver spoon are in terms of actual influence with her father and his merry band of men stripping away women's rights and protections.

Standing up to Donald Trump and his administration on the pay transparency rule would have signaled to the women she purports to support that she stands with them, but she fumbled, and the backlash from women's organizations has been swift.

"This is not a technical tweak as they would have you believe. Make no mistake -- it's an all-out attack on equal pay," Fatima Goss Graves, president and CEO of the National Women's Law Center, said in a statement, according to HuffPost. "Today's action sends a clear message to employers. If you want to ignore pay inequities and sweep them under the rug, this Administration has your back."

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the federal contractors' business lobby, and antiworker and antiregulatory senators were behind the move to stop the Obama-era rule on transparency from going into effect, Vicki Shabo, vice president for workplace policy and strategy at the National Partnership for Women and Families, told HuffPost.

Shabo also called out Ivanka Trump's hypocrisy in failing to back the rule. "For somebody who has long held herself out as a champion for women and for gender equality, it's really disappointing," Shabo said. "[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."

While Donald Trump admitted in his own words that he's grabbed women without consent, he continued his assault on women in other ways just days into taking the oath of office, beginning with signing an executive order that bans U.S. aid to overseas nongovernmental organizations that provide or advise on abortions, his proposed taxpayer-first budget that cuts funding for reproductive services and services like Medicaid and Food Stamps that disproportionately affect women, rescinding workplace protections that held employers accountable for the gender pay gap and sexual harassment suits, and recently dismantling Michelle Obama's Let Girls Learn program.

Through all of that and now the administration's halting the implementation of transparency on pay, Ivanka Trump has remained silent and/or complicit.