A young millennial woman is going to ask for a raise. Over and over, she practices what to say and how she’s going to say it. She’s nervous, especially because her male co-worker, who makes more than her, has been at the company for less time.

Just when the woman is about to lose her nerve, an older female colleague tells her, “Do it.” This peer-to-peer pep talk, this intergenerational sisterhood, is the push she needs to close her own personal wage gap.

This commercial for Secret deodorant, “Stress Test: Raise,” was popular in 2016. It was the girlboss golden era: Bustle and Broadly were popular, “Run the World (Girls)” by Beyoncé was everywhere and Hillary Clinton could still become president. It was also the year that landmark pay equity legislation took effect.

The California Fair Pay Act, passed in 2015 and effective Jan. 1 the next year, changed the state’s existing law from banning sex-based wage disparities between employees performing “equal work” in the “same establishment,” to banning sex-based wage disparities among employees performing “substantially similar work” with no “same establishment” limitation on work location.

At the American Bar Association’s 2026 Labor & Employment Law Conference, former U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission Chair Jenny Yang threaded the needle between the girl-power advertisements and California’s legislation.

“You saw deodorant commercials where somebody was getting ready to ask for a pay raise … Companies were advertising at the Super Bowl that they were like, equal pay employers,” Yang, a partner at Outten & Golden LLP, said. “We really saw a shift from this being more of a litigation-focused issue to being one that was really part of the national dialogue.”

Not only did pay equity poll well across demographics, she explained, but unions also started including this in their collective bargaining as more states started to take action.

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