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Intel will reveal gender and race pay data following $5M settlement

Following a discrimination settlement, the tech giant lunges toward transparency.

Rae Hodge Former senior editor
Rae Hodge was a senior editor at CNET. She led CNET's coverage of privacy and cybersecurity tools from July 2019 to January 2023. As a data-driven investigative journalist on the software and services team, she reviewed VPNs, password managers, antivirus software, anti-surveillance methods and ethics in tech. Prior to joining CNET in 2019, Rae spent nearly a decade covering politics and protests for the AP, NPR, the BBC and other local and international outlets.
Rae Hodge
2 min read
Intel headquarters in Santa Clara, California

After a rough week, Intel offered to open up its pay data. 

Stephen Shankland/CNET

Intel said it'll publicly release employee pay data broken down by race and gender, as originally reported by Bloomberg on Thursday. The promised disclosure follows a week of turmoil at Intel , after the company agreed to pay $5 million to settle employee accusations of pay discrimination based on race and gender. The settlement followed the chipmaker earlier this year saying that it had closed its pay gap

This year, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission will for the first time require the same kind of pay data from all companies with more than 100 employees, though companies will not be required to publicly disclose that data. Previously, as Bloomberg reported, the EEOC required race and gender data, but not pay data.

"Although much progress has been made in the past 50 years, pay disparities continue to be a problem in the American workplace," the EEOC said in a post. The data will "encompass more than 63 million workers and will strengthen enforcement efforts of pay equality laws and help employers evaluate their own practices," it added.

In the tech industry -- which regularly grapples with numbers that show it's predominantly made up of white men -- disparity in pay is shrinking, but slowly. Earlier this year, employment info site Glassdoor looked at more than a half million salary reports and found that at the pace we're going, it's going to take 51 years to close the pay gap between men and women. 

Intel told CNET it'll release its data by the fourth quarter of this year. 

Originally published Oct. 17.
Update, Oct. 22: Adds more information on the pay gap in the tech industry.