Noreen Farrell
Gender Equity · Workplace Civil Rights
Our rights shouldn't depend on our zip code.
Fifteen Days in Sacramento
In the 2000–2001 academic year the University of California, Davis cut every woman from its wrestling team. Four of them, Arezou Mansourian, Lauren Mancuso, Nancy Nien-Li Chiang and Christine Wing-Si Ng, sued under Title IX on December 18, 2003, and Noreen Farrell of Equal Rights Advocates helped lead Mansourian v. Regents of the University of California through the eight years it took. The district court granted the university summary judgment; on February 8, 2010, the Ninth Circuit reversed, holding that women denied equal athletic opportunity need not give a school advance notice before they sue, and sent the case back to Judge Frank C. Damrell Jr. for trial. The bench trial in Sacramento ran fifteen days in May 2011, and on August 3, 2011, the court found that UC Davis had failed to accommodate effectively the athletic interests and abilities of both sexes. The university paid $1.35 million to end the case in April 2012 and changed how it set its rosters and its access to competition. In Brust v. Regents of the University of California, another Title IX action against the same university, Farrell helped obtain terms that added a women's field hockey team.
Her employment cases were tried the same way. She won a $2.46 million jury verdict in Maher v. County of Fresno, a sex-discrimination case that began in a county fire academy, and a jury verdict of about $812,000 in Bojorquez v. ABM Industries, a sexual-harassment case; in Medina v. Station Casinos, another harassment case, her work contributed to a multimillion-dollar settlement. She has represented women and girls in discrimination cases at every level of the federal courts, including the Supreme Court of the United States, and she has written for practitioners, in a Thomson Reuters volume, on certifying classes after Wal-Mart v. Dukes.
Thirteen Percent
In 2015 Equal Rights Advocates drafted and co-sponsored the California Fair Pay Act, which Governor Brown signed on October 6 of that year. Farrell was its architect. The law required equal pay for substantially similar work rather than identical jobs, closed the loopholes employers had used to justify a gap, strengthened the protection of workers who complained and struck at pay secrecy. Ten years on, California's wage gap had narrowed to about 13 percent against a national figure of 18; settlements with Disney, Google, Oracle, Goldman Sachs, Snap, Activision Blizzard and Riot Games had returned more than $500 million to workers; twenty-five states had strengthened their equal pay laws and fourteen, with the District of Columbia, had adopted pay-transparency requirements on California's model. "Ten years later, we've proven that this is a blueprint that works," Farrell said in 2025, "and states across the country agree." She also said what the state's laws were for: "With a White House and Supreme Court determined to upend civil rights protections and throw women out of the workplace, the state laws we have passed over the past 10 years for women and other workers are now our best line of defense against federal attacks."
The laws came out of the coalitions she built. Farrell chairs Equal Pay Today, a campaign of more than two dozen organizations working state by state on the gender and race wage gaps, founded and chairs the Stronger California Women's Agenda Campaign, a network of more than sixty-five organizations that writes and carries legislation on pay, child care, leave and workplace protection, and is a founding partner of the Closing the Women's Wealth Gap Initiative. At Stronger California's convening in Sacramento in January 2026, the network marked nine of its 2025 bills signed into law, among them AB 250, which extended the filing deadlines for sexual-assault claims to account for the delay that trauma and the fear of retaliation impose, and Farrell told the room that the California measures had already been copied in other states with the network's help.
Two Advisors
When the Department of Education rewrote the Title IX rules for campus sexual-harassment proceedings, Equal Rights Advocates sued, with the Victim Rights Law Center, the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation, Legal Voice and survivors as plaintiffs and Morrison & Foerster, the National Women's Law Center and Diane Rosenfeld as counsel. In July 2021, Judge William G. Young of the District of Massachusetts sent one provision back to the Department: the rule that barred a hearing from considering any statement by a person who did not submit to cross-examination, which excluded police reports, medical records and a respondent's own admissions, made the proceedings, he wrote, a "remarkably hollow gesture" for survivors. In California, under Farrell's leadership, the organization co-sponsored AB 1928, the Campus Counsel and Care Act, signed in August 2026, which requires colleges to let each party in a campus sexual-misconduct proceeding bring both an advisor and a support person, so that no student has to choose between technical guidance and someone to sit beside her.
Farrell graduated from Yale University and took her law degree at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she was editor-in-chief of the Hastings Women's Law Journal. She joined Equal Rights Advocates in San Francisco and rose to legal director and then executive director, and under her the organization has represented thousands of women and girls. She wrote Expecting a Baby, Not a Lay-Off on accommodating pregnant workers, Ending Harassment Now: Keeping Our Kids Safe at School, a three-part assessment of women's progress for Title VII's fiftieth anniversary, and an argument in the Hastings Law Journal for a law against discrimination based on family caregiving, and she has written on family-responsibilities discrimination under Title VII, the Family and Medical Leave Act and the Americans with Disabilities Act. She testifies before legislatures, and her commentary has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and Fortune and on NPR, PBS NewsHour and MSNBC. Of California's place in the decade of equal pay laws she said in 2025: "California is not an outlier; it is an instigator."
