Gender Equality Advocates Advance Pay Equity at State Level

It is no secret that women’s rights groups face a hostile national political environment. Yet in some US states they are making significant gains on pay equity. In Illinois, for instance, a new pay transparency law took effect on January 1, 2025; the law requires employers with more than 15 employees to include salary ranges and a description of benefits and other compensation in their job postings.

In addition, the new law states that employers must provide workers with their current salary or salary range, along with a general description of benefits at the time of hire. It further provides that if a company hires a third party to advertise, post, and/or publicize a job offer, that company must provide the salary range and benefits, or a link to the information.

Over a 40-year career, a woman can expect to earn $462,000 less than a man. For a woman of color…more than a $1 million.

Additionally, Chicago passed a law in 2023 to phase out the subminimum wage for tipped workers and increase it to match the standard minimum wage. By the end of the five-year phase-out, the gap should be fully eliminated. Meanwhile, similar state legislation is pending in the Illinois General Assembly, with a rally held in March.

Ideally, policies like these support women workers, who are disproportionately affected by lower wages and opaque hiring practices. But despite gains in places like Chicago, the US gender wage gap persists. According to recent data, women earn approximately 83 percent of what men earn. Advocates continue to organize to change this.

Wage Discrimination Is Intersectional

Earnings disparity is amplified when racial differences are considered.

According to the National Women’s Law Center, on average over a 40-year career, a woman can expect to earn $462,000 less than a man. For a woman of color, this figure rises to more than a $1 million gap in lifetime earnings.

Women of color face greater wage gaps and discrimination, making them more vulnerable. Black women and Latinas are more likely to work in low-paying service jobs, where wage gaps are widest. A 2023 census survey found that Black women earned 64 cents and Latinas 51 cents for every dollar paid to a non-Latino White man. The wide wage gap exacerbates economic vulnerability and increases the risk of domestic violence.

“It impacts the Latinas at also a higher rate because we know the Latinas are caregivers in our families. They take care not just of the children but also of the elderly, of our aging parents,” says Yadira Sánchez, executive director of Poder Latinx, an organization that has a national fellowship to develop Latinas to become civic leaders in their cities.

The campaign to end the tipped minimum wage could help narrow this wage and earnings gap, given that the restaurant industry, particularly in lower wage jobs, disproportionately hires women of color. As Diana Ramirez, senior manager of policy and coalitions at National Women’s Law Center, tells NPQ, a group called One Fair Wage has supported a national campaign for all workers to earn the same minimum wage. Ramirez points out the impacts of the change: “In the seven states where there is already that One Fair Wage policy, women have less poverty, less dependence on social services.”

Earnings Difference Concerns More Than Wages

Advocates at gender equality organizations also point out that the gap in earnings is not only about wages. Other factors, such as the lack of financial support for caregiving tasks, which are mostly carried out by women, diminish women’s earning ability.

Even in states like Illinois where women workers are making large gains, a second challenge after getting laws passed is enforcing them.“A grounding principle in our work to pass laws to close the gender and racial wage gap is that a lot of people only think about pay discrimination as a contributor to the wage gap, and it is a big factor, but there are other factors that we need to also address,” Jessica Ramey Stender, policy director and deputy legal director at Equal Rights Advocates informs NPQ.

For advocates, it is important to understand how other factors drive the earnings gap, such as the lack of access to affordable childcare, or occupational segregation, where women, and particularly women of color, are concentrated in minimum-wage and other low-wage jobs and industries.

Making Equal Pay Laws Stick

Even in states like Illinois where women workers are making large gains, a second challenge after getting laws passed is enforcing them. To even the scales requires both legal strategies and educational efforts that help ensure that workers to know their rights.

One legal enforcement tool is giving workers a private right of action within the statute, which allows them to either go to a state agency to file a complaint about an employer violating the law, or file a lawsuit.

“In some cases, they can go straight to court, and so…in the bills, the laws that we work on, we always have a private right of action,” Stender says.

Increasing salary transparency is also a very important tool for narrowing the gender wage gap. The National Women’s Law Center reports on a recent study showing that laws that prevent employers from asking applicants about their salary history help reduce the wage gap between men and women.

This helps break the cycle of low wages by preventing new employers from aligning new wages with previous, often lower wages. While some states have begun to implement such policies—Massachusetts became the first in August 2016 to prohibit employers from seeking salary history from job applicants—in states where such laws do not exist, companies can still voluntarily adopt policies against asking about salary history.

Another strategy is to break the taboo against sharing wage information. Ramirez points out that this issue is especially important, especially for young women “who don’t dare ask how much they will earn in the job they are applying for.”

As NPQ has covered, workers sharing salary information with each other can be highly empowering. The sharing of salary information is federally protected under the National Labor Relations Act, though some employers have internal policies against wage discussions.

Stender underscores the importance of increased pay transparency: “We know that in the United States, traditionally, and in other places, there has just historically been a lack of transparency around pay, and it’s often been seen as taboo to talk about pay or ask about pay—where [employers] prohibit employees from talking about pay or sharing pay. So another way that we’ve addressed that issue through legislation is by passing laws that prohibit these pay secrecy rules.”

Recently, a number of states have taken the further step of mandating the posting of salary ranges, with new laws taking effect in Illinois, Massachusetts, Vermont, New Jersey, and Minnesota, increasing the number of states with such laws to a dozen.