Framingham’s TJX Cos. could take some heat under a new U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission rule that will require larger public companies to disclose a ratio comparing their CEO’s compensation to the median pay of their workers.

TJX CEO Carol Meyrowitz’s 2015 total pay of ?$28.69 million is 1,159 times that of TJX’s estimated median worker pay of $25,000, according to Bloomberg.

The new pay rule, set to take effect in 2017, was designed to embarrass companies “because the numbers are embarrassing,” said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance at the University of Delaware. “The disclosure was never something that was demanded by large investors, because it was not considered relevant to their analysis of a company,” he said. “What it was designed to do was to inflame the employees of the company and create discontent in the organization to force boards to reconsider pay.”

A spokeswoman for TJX, owner of T.J. Maxx, Marshalls and HomeGoods, noted it added 176 new stores and about 7,000 jobs in fiscal year 2015.

“Executive compensation at TJX remains heavily weighted towards performance-based incentives for our CEO and senior executives,” the spokeswoman said.

“They act as if the only people motivated by money are millionaires,” said Rosanna Landis Weaver, manager of the Power of the Proxy: Executive Compensation program at As You Sow, a California nonprofit promoting environmental and social corporate responsibility. “It’s not an uncommon hypocrisy, but it’s a pretty blatant one.”

TJX in February said it would raise its minimum wage to $9 an hour this past June and $10 next year. “It would take a worker working full-time — unusual in the retail industry — 1,336 years … to earn the amount Meyrowitz was paid in a year,” Weaver said.