California lawmakers are exploring legislation aimed at making it harder for employers to pay men and women differently for the same job.
The bill focuses on the common practice of asking job applicants about their current salary in order to decide what to offer them. The practice makes sense from the perspective of the employer, who does not want to offer applicants much more than it would take to get them to ditch their old job.
Recommended For You
The bill would allow employers to ask about an applicant's current pay, but it would prohibit bosses from using that information to justify paying a man and a woman hired into the same position differently.
Some advocates for gender pay equity have pushed for laws that would bar employers from asking about pay history entirely. So far, Massachusetts is the only state to have adopted such a law.
Related: C-suite remains male-dominated
A bill that sought the same policy in California was vetoed last year by Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, who urged the state to be patient with other pay equity laws the state had recently introduced.
The law that was ultimately passed last year was touted as one of the most stringent pay equity laws in the country. It broadened the definition of gender-based pay discrimination to include instances in which men and women are paid differently for doing "substantially similar work," rather than necessarily sharing the same job title.
The law that California is now poised to implement has not provoked nearly as much opposition as the more aggressive version sought last year. As the Society of Human Resource Professionals explains in a blog post, that group and the California Chamber of Commerce opposed the previous version but are not against the current one.
Related: 10 worst states for women
Michael Kalt, who leads the lobbying operation for the California chapter of SHRM, said the proposed bill is a great improvement from the perspective of HR managers.
"You couldn't really ask about what their salary was, and you may have had to go through rounds of [interviews] not knowing if this person would ever accept what you were considering offering," he told SHRM writer June Bell.
© 2025 ALM Global, LLC, All Rights Reserved. Request academic re-use from www.copyright.com. All other uses, submit a request to [email protected]. For more information visit Asset & Logo Licensing.
