This and many other Obama policies like it were pure and simple harassment. Their purpose was to intimidate businesses into complying with left-wing notions of what the workplace should be like while providing the federal government with lots of information it could misuse to justify the further creep of the regulatory state.
Before Obama, companies of a certain size (and all federal contractors) already had to provide the feds with certain data points about their workforce - on average 180 data points per company, which sounds substantial because it is. Obama ratcheted that up, just a tad, to where companies had to submit an average of 3,660 data points. And that included data about what they pay, broken down by race, sex . . . all the usual things Democrats wax on about. It was a hunt for anecdotes about racism and sexism, as well as a massive usurpation of businesses' time, money and other resources.
