In 2007, Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote a blistering dissent in a Title VII case brought by Lilly Ledbetter, a former supervisor at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber plant who discovered she was paid less than male colleagues in equal or less senior positions, and sued for sex discrimination.
The dissent touched upon the pervasive problem of secrecy that today’s pay transparency laws are trying to solve. “Pay disparities often occur, as they did in Ledbetter’s case, in small increments; cause to suspect that discrimination is at work develops only over time,” Ginsburg wrote. “Comparative pay information, moreover, is often hidden from the employee’s view. Employers may keep under wraps the pay differentials maintained among supervisors, no less the reasons for those differentials.”
By the time Colorado enacted a law requiring employers to share salary information with potential job seekers in 2019, policymakers had been wrestling with fair pay issues like this one for decades. At the federal level they sought to remedy them first with the Equal Pay Act of 1963, and later with the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which expanded the statute of limitations on discrimination claims like Ledbetter’s, removing a hurdle for employees bringing lawsuits.
Thanks to pay transparency laws that have been enacted in more than a dozen US states and Washington, DC, workers have access to much more information about how their employers pay, and why. But like the policies that came before them, these laws haven’t yet resulted in a meaningful narrowing of the gender pay gap—one key goal of the movement.
The goal. Though pay transparency can refer to a variety of different compensation practices, the term generally describes laws requiring employers to disclose a good-faith salary range for the jobs they advertise.
Advocates who supported pay transparency legislation believed “giving people information at the time of a new job search was really crucial,” said Helena Almeida, VP, managing counsel with ADP. “It’s harder to increase somebody’s salary while they’re in a particular role. So getting that information to people at the beginning of a new job was vital.”
These pay transparency measures were preceded by a wave of state laws banning employers from asking about a candidate’s salary history, which was already helping to change the dynamics of compensation and bargaining power in the workplace, she added.
Colorado was the first state to enact a pay transparency law, as Gov. Jared Polis signed a bill requiring employers to post salary ranges into law in May 2019. In the bill’s text, legislators cited the persistent gender pay gap as inhibiting women’s earning potential and ability to provide for their families.
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More than a dozen US states require employers to share salary ranges, but these efforts haven’t yet closed the gender pay gap.