Women have been chasing workplace equality for decades, yet despite marked strides, pay parity has remained an elusive prize. A recent court ruling, however, should help change that.

Last year, women’s earnings amounted to 82 percent of men’s, a Pew Research Center analysis found. The reasons for the discrepancy are complex, ranging from measurable factors such as education level to more abstract causes like persisting gender discrimination.

But the latter factor should be diminished following the ruling from the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The question before the court in San Francisco: whether differences in male and female employees’ salaries can be justified based on their pay at prior jobs. Previously, the law had been unclear on this point; the court handed down a definitive no in an opinion filed in April.

“We now hold that prior salary alone or in combination with other factors cannot justify a wage differential,” the majority opinion states. “To hold otherwise — to allow employers to capitalize on the persistence of the wage gap and perpetuate that gap ad infinitum — would be contrary to the text and history of the Equal Pay Act, and would vitiate the very purpose for which the Act stands.”

So basically, past salaries — even if weighed along with other considerations — can reflect historical sex discrimination, and employers shouldn’t be able to gain from or extend that.

Here’s how the situation played out in real life:

The Fresno County Office of Education hired Aileen Rizo as a math consultant in late 2009. The county determined her salary based on its usual practice: adding 5 percent to the salary from her previous job, which was teaching middle and high school math, and using that result to place her on the county’s corresponding salary schedule. In her case, it was step one of level one.

Out to lunch with colleagues a few years later, Rizo found out that male employees hired as math consultants after her had come in at higher salary steps. She complained and, dissatisfied with the county’s explanation, eventually filed suit. The county admitted that Rizo was paid less but argued that basing her lower salary on prior pay fell under the Equal Pay Act’s exceptions, namely the catchall of “a differential based on any factor other than sex.”

But the court, coming down firmly on the side of the working woman, disagreed that prior salary is a “factor other than sex.”

“Although the (Equal Pay Act) has prohibited sex-based wage discrimination for more than fifty years, the financial exploitation of working women embodied by the gender pay gap continues to be an embarrassing reality of our economy,” the majority opinion states.

As the court affirmed, discrimination isn’t a thing of the past — 42 percent of women responding to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey reported having experienced workplace gender discrimination, compared with 22 percent of men. Pay disparity was among the top reported forms of discrimination.

If you think you’re being treated unfairly at work because of your gender — particularly if past pay factored into your current salary — contact Keller Grover for a free consultation. In more than 25 years litigating fraud and employment cases, Keller Grover has recovered millions for its clients.