Job postings need to include the salary. Thanks to a new law, in NYC they will.

I remember vividly my red-hot rage when I learned that a male colleague with the same job was making over $10,000 more than I was. It was early in my career, and our credentials were nearly identical: same law school graduation year, same fellowship and similar clerkships. Our qualifications differed in two ways: He’d worked at a law firm for a year, during which I represented domestic violence and human trafficking survivors. 

That pay difference was around 20 percent of my salary, and I was struggling under the weight of law school loans. Our employer was a government agency. It had never occurred to me to negotiate on salary; I assumed there was a set pay scale.

New York City recently enacted a law that will make this experience much less likely for workers there: It requires employers to include a salary range in all listings for jobs wholly or partly in the city, including work in an office or in the field or remote work. The law’s effective date, initially planned for this past weekend, was postponed until November, a last-minute delay that shouldn’t thwart its ultimate implementation.

In passing this legislation, New York City is playing catch-up with Colorado, where a similar law took effect last year. At the time, there was concern about employers’ refusing to hire Colorado workers because of the law. But it looks instead like Colorado was a national leader. More states and cities should pass pay transparency laws requiring salary ranges in job postings, prohibiting setting pay based on prior salary history and protecting salary discussions among employees. 

Laws requiring disclosure of salary ranges in job postings, like other pay transparency laws, reduce gender and race disparities. Women still earn far less than men — 83 cents to the dollar in 2022 — and this gap is even worse for women of color: Black women…