Jennifer A. Reisch

As the firm's legal director, Reisch was co-lead counsel for a Title VII class of former and current naval shipyard female employees who alleged gender and sexual harassment at a Virginia facility. The resulting $4.6 million settlement included both programmatic and economic components. U.S. District Judge Arenda L. Wright Allen of the Eastern District of Virginia gave the deal final approval in January. Aviles v. BAE Systems Norfolk Ship Repair Inc., 13-cv-00418 (E.D. Va., filed July 29, 2013)

The settlement provided more than $3 million in back pay to the class and required BAE Systems to make significant changes in its policies and procedures to combat discrimination and harassment.

In May, Reisch and colleagues feted the four named plaintiffs as 2016 Gender Justice Honorees. "It was so great," Reisch said. "We flew them all out here and had a wonderful time." The win came with a powerful story. The judge who heard the case, Wright Allen, a 2011 President Barack Obama appointee, is the first African-American female federal judge in Virginia; the four named plaintiffs are also African American, Reisch said. In 2014, Wright Allen overturned Virginia's statutory same-sex marriage ban, finding it unconstitutional. That allowed one of the named plaintiffs in Aviles, Kel Sharpe, to wed her longtime partner. "ERA had nothing to do with that marriage case, though of course we supported the outcome, but it certainly fit nicely with one of our Aviles plaintiffs," Reisch said.

Reisch worked with state Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson (D-Santa Barbara), the chair of the California Legislative Women's Caucus, to draft and enact SB 358, amending the California Equal Pay Act to let workers show pay disparity at an employer's different job sites and require an employer to demonstrate a compelling reason to pay workers different wages.

"It's the strongest equal pay law in the U.S.," Reisch said. "Since the law took effect Jan. 1, employers have clearly been paying attention." At the United State of Women Summit at the White House in June, she said "companies actually came out and said they will do pay equity audits." One of them on board in California was Salesforce.com Inc. "They did an audit last year and discovered a $3 million pay gap," Reisch said, "and they corrected it."

Reisch said she has been invited to apply to the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls' Pay Equity Task Force, formed after SB 358 passed. And she is a member of the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing's Task Force on the Prevention of Sexual Harassment in the Workplace. "There's a lot more work to do," she said.

— John Roemer