A reportreleased Monday on the eve of EqualPay Day ranks 46 of the world's largest companies on their effortsto close persistent gender and racial pay gaps—and the results are dismal.

Half of all the companies flunkedthe pay equality test and only one, Citigroup Inc., earned an Agrade, according to the report from investment advisory firm ArjunaCapital and Proxy Impact, a shareholder advocacy and proxy votingservice.

Companies in the financial,technology, retail and health care industries were graded acrossfive categories: equal pay gap, median pay gap, racial pay gap,transparency and commitment to pay equality.

The results suggest companies inevery sector are struggling, though some more than others. Ten ofthe 19 financial companies failed. Five of the nine retailcompanies flunked. Five of the six health care companies received Fgrades. The tech sector fared slightly better—three of its 12companies failed.

Natasha Lamb, wealth manager and managing partner at Arjuna,said in a prepared statement that the company had “pressed 22 majorU.S. companies to take critical first steps toward pay equity,”adding that “it's time for Silicon Valley and Wall Street to stepup their game.”

But Christine Hendrickson, a labor and employment law partner atSeyfarthShaw in Chicago whoco-chairs the firm's pay equity group, cautioned that the reporthas “significant limitations,” in part because it dinged employerswho choose not to publish their pay statistics and drawsconclusions from a “mishmash” of variables. 

“If I were sitting within anorganization … my focus would be on figuring out which employeesare doing similar work, ensuring that I had the data that isrelevant to the pay of my employees and performing proactive payequity analyses and making adjustments if I saw anything that wasoff,” she added.

While many companies named in thereport took home Fs, there were some standouts. Apple Inc. andIntel Corp. got the only B grades in the tech class. Bank of NewYork Mellon Corp., J.P. Morgan Chase and Co., Wells Fargo & Co.and American Express Co. also received B's, as did Nike Inc.,Starbucks Corp. and Pfizer Inc.

According to the report, 10companies said they had achieved 100 percent equal pay,including the Progressive Corp., Apple, Intel, Alphabet Inc.,Facebook Inc., eBay Inc., Texas Instruments Inc., Microsoft Corp.,Adobe Inc., and Starbucks. Last year, only five companiesreportedly reached that equal pay goal.

In the financial industry, whichhas a 5.6 percent gender pay gap—the highest of the four businesssectors in the report—Citigroup was a model student that receivedhigh marks for being transparent about its pay practices, accordingto the report.

Last year, Citi announced it wasthe first financial institution to publicly release the results ofa pay equityreview that looked at 36percent of the company's workforce in the U.S., U.K. and Germany.The study was based on pay rates adjusted for job function, leveland geography and found that the pay rates for women and minoritieswere about 99 percent the same as for men andnon-minorities.

Citi extended its pay equityreview this year to cover all employees globally and reported thatits findings were virtually the same as the prior year's partialreview.

But Citi also released for the first timeits raw pay gap for women andU.S. minorities. The newreview found the median pay for women globally was 71 percent ofthe median for men. The median pay for U.S. minorities was 93percent of the median for non-minorities.

“This reiterates the importanceof our goals to increase representation of women and U.S.minorities in senior and higher-paying roles at Citi,” SaraWechter, Citi's head of human resources, said in a preparedstatement. “That is how we will reduce the difference in our rawpay gap numbers over time.”

According to Wechter, Citi aimsto increase representation at the assistant vice president throughmanaging director levels to at least 40 for women globally and 8percent for black employees in the U.S. by the end of2021.

Michael Passoff, CEO of Proxy Impact and co-author of thereport, noted that pay equality poses a “key challenge forcompanies as they face reputational risk, consumer backlash, newlegislation and governmental and employee lawsuits.”

“Ultimately, it is both equal pay and equal opportunity thatwill eliminate the gender pay gap,” he added.

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