WASHINGTON — A young millennial woman is going to ask for a raise. Over and over, she practices what to say and how she’s going to say it. She’s nervous, especially because her male co-worker, who makes more than her, has been at the company for less time.
Just when the woman is about to lose her nerve, an older female colleague tells her, “Do it.” This peer-to-peer pep talk, this intergenerational sisterhood, is the push she needs to close her own personal wage gap.
This commercial for Secret deodorant, “Stress Test: Raise,” was popular in 2016. It was the girlboss golden era: Bustle and Broadly were popular, “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyoncé was everywhere and Hillary Clinton could still become president. It was also the year that landmark pay equity legislation took effect.
The California Fair Pay Act, passed in 2015 and effective Jan. 1 the next year, changed the state’s existing law from banning sex-based wage disparities between employees performing “equal work” in the “same establishment,” to banning sex-based wage disparities among employees performing “substantially similar work” with no “same establishment” limitation on work location.
At the American Bar Association’s 2026 Labor & Employment Law Conference, former U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Jenny Yang threaded the needle between the girl-power advertisements and California’s legislation.
“You saw deodorant commercials where somebody was getting ready to ask for a pay raise … Companies were advertising at the Super Bowl that they were like, equal pay employers,” Yang, a partner at Outten & Golden LLP, said. “We really saw a shift from this being more of a litigation-focused issue to being one that was really part of the national dialogue.”
Not only did pay equity poll well across demographics, she explained, but unions also started including this in their collective bargaining as more states started to take action.
Yang, along with Erin Connell, partner at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP; Erin Drake, senior advisor and legal counsel for the Women’s National Basketball Players Association; Toni Locklear, chief technical officer and litigation practice leader for APTMetrics; and Stephen Malone, interim counsel for Thermo Fisher Scientific, each discussed how pay equity is so much more than a compliance issue.
In their session titled “Pay Equity in Practice: Collaborative Strategies for Closing the Gap,” they sought to dissect the multi-headed beast of pay equity — including its components of salary history, pay transparency and the protected freedom to discuss pay with colleagues.
With pay equity laws, employers have to rise to the occasion
At the time, lawyers and people generally championing business interests lamented the effect the California Fair Pay Act would have on employers. Homing in on interlocation pay disparities, Duane Morris LLP’s law blog noted, “Such employers may be forced to defend the existence and amount of these disparities by pointing to operational needs that are difficult to quantify but no less real.”
Similarly, Helen McFarland and Shari Dunn wrote in a document for insurance company Arthur J. Gallagher & Co., “While the actual revisions to existing law are slight, and in some instances only serve to re-state the manner in which the current laws were being interpreted, the changes have the potential to wreak havoc by requiring employers to entirely restructure (and be able to defend) their compensation systems.”
They added that the “rigid systems” created by the California Fair Pay Act “may affect an employer’s ability to offer competitive salaries to high value employees without impacting overall salaries within the company.”
U.S. Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., speaks on the Paycheck Fairness Act at the U.S. Capitol on March 9, 2023, in Washington, D.C.
Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images
These concerns have continued well past 2016, as various kinds of pay-related legislation takes effect. While California was the early adopter, many states enacted salary transparency and history laws in the 2020s. Additionally, the European Union Pay Transparency Directive turned the heat up on multinational employers. Almost half of employers with major operations in Europe expressed concern in an October 2024 report about how the pay transparency law would affect their company.
Similarly, in a 2025 global report, about 1 in 5 organizations said they were ready for mandated pay transparency, with about 3 in 5 saying they were still “getting ready” for new laws.
And while employers, here and abroad, may bemoan how this legislation forces them to restructure their compensation strategy into something defensible — that’s kind of the point, per the attorneys at ABA LEL.
Malone noted that “pay transparency laws have generated more in-house corporate discipline.” A lot of pay audits were “retroactive examinations, kind of one and done, oftentimes in response to litigation,” he said.
How HR can mitigate risk — and go above and beyond
After salary history bans came a wave of pay range-related laws. Yang noted that Colorado was the first state to require ranges in job postings, setting off a domino effect where 17 states plus Washington, D.C., now have similar laws on the books.
“That has a number of benefits,” Yang said. “But if you’re going to post your pay ranges, it’s often a notification to your current workforce that they might be underpaid. You need to do that kind of assessment of your job architecture and your pay ranges before you post them.”
Locklear, an industrial psychologist, also spoke at length about job architecture and how it is crucial to HR best practices. Malone recommended that employers team up with external consultants to help employers take a “proactive” approach by outlining job architecture on the front end.
This includes “job leveling,” getting into the nitty-gritty of job titles and expectations therein, and outlining promotion ladders. “It’s really necessary to have that in place before you start putting salary ranges into your job descriptions,” Malone said.
In many ways, the attorneys at ABA LEL mirrored the colleague nudging her younger co-worker to go for a raise. Except this time, encouragement was reserved for the HR professionals and in-house counsel looking for a sign to tackle pay equity at their company — and make their compensation strategy risk-proof.