Last Friday, a new regulation was proposed by the Obama administration that will make it harder and more expensive for employers to hire and promote white males, enrich class action lawyers, and do absolutely nothing to accomplish the ostensible goal of raising the pay of women relative to men.

Claiming women aren’t getting paid enough, President Obama wants to make it easier to accuse employers of gender discrimination and hit them with class-action lawsuits. A new regulation proposed on Friday will require all employers with 100 or more workers to report how much their workforce is paid, broken down by race and gender. The rule, slated to go into effect in September 2017, will cause headaches for employers and anyone — man or woman — who works hard and expects to get ahead based on merit. The winners are federal bean counters, class-action lawyers and the Democratic Party, which is playing up the gender “wage gap” as usual during this election year.

Paying men and women differently for the same work is already against the law. The fact that on average women earn less than men in the entire workforce is the product of personal choices. Many women take time away from work to raise children. Women tend to prefer occupations in non-technical fields, often in human services, which pay less. And women tend to avoid physically demanding blue-collar occupations in the skilled trades, which can pay very well: construction, auto repair, machinery maintenance, and the like. Mike Rowe is doing wonderful work pointing out the opportunities available for skilled blue-collar work, but his information reaches fewer women than men, because women now constitute a 50% greater share of college students than men.

The new regs will make it risky to hire or promote white males.

Your employer will have to lump workers into 12 salary bands. If you’re a white male up for a raise, but the band above yours already includes too many while males, tough luck. Your boss will be pressured to give the raise to a woman or minority to avoid triggering EEOC scrutiny.

This data collection is a godsend for EEOC regulators looking for targets, and it hands class-action lawyers the statistics they need on a silver platter.

Even worse: the presumption is that the employer discriminates, unless proven otherwise:

Employers will have to change their policies to avoid these differences — for example, not preferring the job applicant who has a college degree over the applicant who doesn’t, unless the job can be shown to require college skills. The burden is on employers. It’s assumed they’re discriminating, in other words, and they have to prove they’re not. Jenny Yang, chairwoman of Obama’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, defends the massive fishing expedition, saying, “pay discrimination goes undetected because of a lack of accurate information about what people are paid.”

Just another way of making it more difficult and expensive to run an organization with employees. Is it any wonder that job creation has stalled?

Hat tip: Ed Lasky