The Commission has a long history of advocacy work on equal pay. Former Commissioner Senator Hannah Beth Jackson authored the California Fair Pay Act, the strongest equal pay law in the nation, as well as SB 973 and SB 1383, requiring large California employers to report salary data and protecting California’s paid family leave benefits, respectively. These efforts were crucial and the Commission continues to expand on them including co-sponsoring Commissioner Senator Monique Limón‘s Salary Transparency bill, SB 1162, which was signed into law by Governor Newsom in September 2022. The Commission on the Status of Women and Girls (CCSWG) co-sponsored along with the California Employment Lawyers Association and Equal Rights Advocates, SB 642 (Limόn) Pay Equity Enforcement Act, was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom in 2025.  

In January 2016, SB 358, the California Fair Pay Act, took effect and the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls launched a statewide, multi-stakeholder Pay Equity Task Force. The mission of the Task Force was to engage diverse interests and facilitate an ongoing dialogue about pay equity between employees and their advocates, small and large employers, policymakers, legislators, experts in human resources and compensation practices, industrial organizational psychologists, labor economists, social scientists, and legal and other experts in the public and private sectors. The Task Force provided a forum for engagement and dialogue with diverse interests who have the power to effect change in workplace and compensation policies and practices. In 2017, another law took effect that further expanded protections under California’s equal pay law to employees of a “different race or ethnicity.”