Dive Brief:
- California's new Fair Pay Act, which awaits Gov. Jerry Brown's signature, may be the nation's most aggressive attempt yet to close the salary gap between men and women, according to the LA Times.
- Supporters said the legislation, passed unanimously by the California Senate, closes loopholes that prevented enforcement of existing anti-discrimination laws, the Times reports. Under the law, male and female employees who perform "substantially similar" work will receive equal pay, even if their job titles aren't the same or if they work in different offices for the same employer.
- For example, the Times reports, a hotel's female housekeepers could challenge higher wages paid to male janitors because they do similar work despite different job titles, and the Times article says that employees would be able to ask about and discuss co-workers' wages without fear of retaliation from employers.
Dive Insight:
"It's been a long march to try to get laws that are strong enough that would actually close the gender wage gap in this country," Noreen Farrell, executive director of civil rights organization Equal Rights Advocates, which was a co-sponsor of the bill, told the Times. "We have been envisioning what would be the strongest state law for equal pay in the nation for some time, and this is it."
Employers that want to understand and mitigate their risks can consider conducting an attorney-client privileged analysis of employee pay, according to a blog post at JDSupra by Seyfarth Shaw, the employment law firm.
While the firm reports that employers don’t intentionally pay women any less, pay differentials may appear to be superficially correlated with sex as a result of inconsistent processes for setting pay, especially starting salaries.
In the meantime, the California law may be a harbinger for employers nationwide when it comes to gender pay.
