"California Is Getting Serious About the Gender Wage Gap"

Article here. Excerpt:

'First, what’s so great about California’s new Fair Pay Act? Most important, it requires that employees receive equal pay for “substantially similar” work, even if their job titles aren’t actually the same as their colleagues’. This language is intended to cover more female workers and capture more subtle gradations of inequality than the truism of “equal pay for equal work,” which is enshrined in the federal Equal Pay Act. As DoubleX contributor Bryce Covert has written at ThinkProgress, there was a groundswell of support for the standard of “comparable” or “substantially similar” work in the 1980s. Twenty states adopted this kind of language—the movement that really spawned the idea of “pay equity”—and, as a result, “more than 335,000 women got a raise and 20 percent of their gender wage gap was eliminated,” Covert reports. Unfortunately, many of those statutes have since lapsed.

But California is trying to bring the concept of “pay equity” back into vogue—and to expand on it. The new bill gives women some additional leverage by specifying that they can demand equal pay with workers at different physical sites; the law applies to anyone doing comparable work for the same company. It also bars employers from retaliating against workers who discuss their own pay or seek information about others’. California women are doing better than American women overall—making an average of 84 cents on the dollar, versus 78 cents nationwide—but the gap for women of color is among the worst in the country: Latina women in the state made 44 cents for every dollar a white man earned in 2014. “We’re closing all the loopholes,” said California state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, who wrote the bill. “No more excuses.”'