By Andrew Cohen
Every year, the Berkeley Center on Comparative Equality and Anti-Discrimination Law — which has over 1,000 members spanning six continents addressing systemic inequality — reflects its ambitious aspirations with the Gender Justice Summit.
The latest two-day event addressing new developments in discrimination and harassment law, held last week at Berkeley Law, featured dozens of leading experts unpacking timely issues. While they addressed myriad topics, a unifying thread clearly emerged: When it comes to gender equity progress, things are trending in the wrong direction.
“It’s certainly going backwards in the United States,” Berkeley Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky said in a keynote. Globally, he mentioned a recent United Nations study describing areas of regression and stating that at its current rate, the world is at least 300 years away from gender equality. In the U.S., Chemerinsky cited “the dismantling of the Department of Education making it much less likely Title IX will be enforced, threats to reproductive justice, and attacks on transgender individuals” as driving factors.
He discussed the impact of the Supreme Court’s 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision invalidating Roe v. Wade, the increase in state laws restricting or illegalizing abortion, and the federal government’s push to ban mifepristone, used to terminate pregnancies at 10 weeks or less, and limit the availability of contraceptives.
Berkeley Law alum and former faculty member Ann O’Leary ’05, vice president of global policy for OpenAI and California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s former chief of staff, said such efforts have created “an extreme situation where some states are trying to entirely ban abortion and some like California and New York are proactively passing shield laws (which safeguard patients and providers from out-of-state investigations, lawsuits, or liability for abortions legally performed legally within the shielding state).”
Several other prominent alumni also shared insights about longstanding hurdles and emerging challenges.
On the job
During a panel on developments in employment discrimination law, Rosha Jones ’11, partner and co-chair of Folger Levin’s Labor & Employment Practice Group, said the majority of harassment cases she encounters occur outside the workplace.
“With a lot of clients, it’s something that happens at the company party, messages on Slack, DMs, an Instagram post, that kind of thing,” she said. “One piece of free advice I can give: Nothing good happens with your co-workers after midnight.”
Jones noted that recent guidance from a California Court of Appeal case helped solidify that an employer’s lack of a suitable response to a complaint of harassment can in itself create a hostile work environment.
“Is the conduct related to work? Was employer equipment or an employer venue used? Was the conduct employer arranged or sanctioned? Did the employer benefit from the conduct? These are all helpful factors for lawyers to consider when advising clients,” she said.
Panelists discussed California’s recent efforts to level the gender playing field in the employment realm, including California Senate Bill 642, known as the Pay Equity Enforcement Act. Signed into law on Oct. 8, 2025, it gives employees three years to bring an equal pay claim against their employer and wage comparisons now include all forms of pay — including salary, overtime pay, bonuses, stock options, profit sharing, bonus plans, life insurance, vacation, holiday pay, gas allowances, and benefits.
Jones said that at the federal level, however, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has made diversity, equity, and inclusion programs a target, noting that its chair called 2026 “a DEI reckoning.”
Attacks on diversity
Lieff Cabraser Managing Partner Kelly Dermody ’93, immediate past chair of the American Bar Association’s Section of Labor and Employment Law, gave a keynote about litigation against the Trump Administration and its efforts to curb gender rights and other diversity, citing how federal research got cut off for a plant diversity study because “diversity” appeared in the word search.
“We’re seeing the acquiescence of powerful institutions — Fortune 100 companies, law firms, Ivy league schools, and major media companies,” Dermody said. “But last year there were 71 cases filed by state attorneys general against the administration, and of the roughly 50 that have been resolved, they’ve won over 40 of them.”
Moderating a panel on domestic violence and sexual harassment, Berkeley Law Domestic Violence & Gender-Based Violence Practicum Director Mallika Kaur ’10 described how the surge in “violent misogyny online, at times quickly dismissed as ‘#MeToo backlash,’ fuels the same backlash.”
Fellow panelists shared anecdotes about the prevalence of harassment in their own past work environments, and the juxtaposition of knowing such conduct was illegal while lacking access to a functional legal mechanism that could effectively address the situation.
They also said California is now at the forefront of protecting women in the workplace, passed the nation’s first domestic violence tort, and often creates a legal protection template that other states eventually follow.
Confronting retaliation
On a panel addressing the surge in defamation litigation as harassment and retaliation against women who come forward, Equal Rights Advocates Policy Director and Deputy Legal Director Jessica Stender ’09 noted a chilling effect.
“People felt more empowered to speak out before,” she said. “Unfortunately, we’re seeing a shift in that now with more workers and students being threatened by or hit with retaliatory defamation claims. One of the most pernicious problems about this for survivors is that even the threat of a defamation suit can deter them from talking about what happened or bringing a case.”
The financial demand of having to pay a lawyer to defend against a retaliatory defamation claim is another hurdle, and Stender said going through expensive litigation often reactivates the initial trauma.
Panelists described the standards for a viable defamation claim and how in California, defamation suits allow prevailing defendants to recover attorney fees if their case is deemed frivolous, unreasonable, or groundless. They also explained how California allows lawyers to gain compensation based on a percentage of case damages awarded as opposed to their hourly rate, allowing more people to afford representation to defend against defamation suits and to choose from a wider pool of lawyers.
“This fee-shifting rule is designed to encourage valid harassment claims while preventing frivolous suits,” Stender said. “It’s a way to stop the weaponization of the law.”
Other panels addressed Title IX in the face of executive attacks on civil rights, immigration and gender violence, strengthening gender-based violence responses for women and girls initiatives in turbulent times, comparative investigations practice, sexual violence and sexual harassment in universities, preserving anti-discrimination law, and community resilience.
Chemerinsky called it fitting that the conference was held at Berkeley Law, noting it hired the nation’s first female law professor (Barbara Nachtrieb Armstrong) in 1919, iconic Professor Herma Hill Kay co-authored the first casebook on sex discrimination in the law with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Berkeley was the second law school to have a journal in the field.
Center Co-Director Professor David Oppenheimer, whose new book The Diversity Principle will be released by Yale University Press later this month, summed up the program’s underlying themes and asked the lawyers attending to join him in affirming that “this is our time to step up to protect the rule of law and the hard-won civil rights of all people against those who would return us to a time when women and people of color were at best second-class citizens. We studied law, we practiced law, we sharpened our skills as lawyers so that when a crisis like this befell us we would be ready to step up for justice.”