What’s next after the passage of the NY Equal Pay Law? How else can we influence equal pay policies in the private sector?
Join PowHerNY and Co-host, the New York Women’s Foundation in meeting longtime advocate and firebrand, Martha Burk, who will discuss new approaches to achieving equal pay, including the pay equity initiative she developed in New Mexico that requires equal pay reporting by municipal contractors.

President Obama employed this new approach by Executive Order, and NYC and NYS will be considering legislation soon modeled after this innovative strategy. Join the conversation and be part of our campaign to accelerate economic equality for NY’s women.

Learn More : New Mexico Contractor Reporting Initiatives

In 2009, Governor Bill Richardson established the Governor’s Task Force on Fair and Equal Pay (“Task Force”). Based on the recommendations of the Task Force, Governor Richardson subsequently issued an executive order that required companies that wanted to contract with the State to provide basic pay equity reports. The pay reports use the same nine occupational categories used by the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s (EEOC) EEO-1 forms. The reporting requirement applies to all state agencies that let contracts and all categories of purchasing.

About 3,200 firms are covered by the requirements, ranging in size from New Mexico’s largest employer,

Intel (with more than 3,000 employees) to firms with only 10 employees. This reporting has become a regular part of the contracting process and New Mexico employers have not reported difficulties complying with the law

Martha Burk, architect of the state initiative, reports that the City of Albuquerque (pop. +555,000), under a Republican mayor, has instituted pay equity reporting for city contractors based on the state model.

Link to Reporting Materials for New Mexico Pay Equity Initiative

Learn More : Martha Burk

Martha Burk is a political psychologist and women’s issues expert who is co-founder of the Center for Advancement of Public Policy, a research and policy analysis organization in Washington, D.C. She serves as the Money Editor for Ms. magazine, and she is a syndicated newspaper columnist and frequent front-page blogger for Huffington Post. In January 2012 she launched her national public radio show Equal Time with Martha Burk. Her latest book Your Voice, Your Vote: The Savvy Woman’s Guide to Power, Politics, and the Change We Need (2015) is a Ms. magazine book selection. Her work has been published in major U.S. newspapers and she has appeared on all major television networks in the United States.

From 2000-2005 Dr. Burk served as Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations a network of over 200 national women’s groups collectively representing ten million women. In that capacity she led the campaign to open Augusta National Golf Club to women, and she remains at the forefront of change for women in corporate America. She crafted the first- in- the- nation gender pay equity initiative at the state level in New Mexico in 2010 as a senior advisor to Governor Bill Richardson, and continues to advise government entities at all levels on gender pay equity.

Burk is a frequent speaker on women’s issues, civil society, and women’s leadership. She is an active contributor to the Journalism and Women Symposium, and is a contributing speaker to SheSource, a Project of the Women’s Media Center. Burk holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Texas at Arlington. Her background includes experience as a university research director, management professor, and advisor to both non-government organizations (NGO s) and political campaigns and organizations.

In addition to extensive work on domestic policy, Dr. Burk has conducted training workshops with women’s NGOs internationally in Macedonia and Kuwait, under the sponsorship of USAID and the United Nations, and has conducted training in the U.S. for delegations from Russia, Botswana, Korea, Romania, Bulgaria, and the Middle East. She has recently been a member of official U.S. Delegations to international conferences in Cuba, Iceland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and China. Dr. Burk has been asked by the U.S. Department of State to brief the foreign press on the U.S. presidential elections several times.

Dr. Burk has served on the Commission for Responsive Democracy, the Advisory Committee of Americans for Workplace Fairness, the Sex Equity Caucus of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, and the board of directors of the National Committee on Pay Equity. She serves as an advisory board member to several other national organizations, including the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM, and Women for World Peace, a project of the Twenty First Century Foundation, and the PAX World Fund.