California employers would be barred from asking job applicants about their prior salaries if Gov. Jerry Brown signs into law a new bill seeking to close the state’s gender pay gap.

AB 168, which landed on the governor’s desk last week after clearing both the Senate and the Assembly, would also prohibit an employer from relying on applicants’ prior salaries to determine whether to offer them a job, and how much to pay them. Instead, the bill would require employers to divulge a position’s pay scale if a job applicants asks.

The goal is to eliminate the wage disparity between men and women — last year women employed full-time in California made an average of 88 cents to every dollar a man made, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It’s an issue that hits close to home for many women in Silicon Valley. Three women who used to work at Google sued the search giant in September, claiming the company systematically pays women less and has a “sexist culture.” Google, which has a workforce that’s nearly 70 percent male, already was fighting a federal probe into alleged gender-based pay discrimination. In August, Oracle was hit with a similar lawsuit accusing the company of paying female engineers less than their male counterparts.

“Nobody denies it’s a real issue,” said Assembly member Susan Talamantes Eggman (D-Stockton), who introduced the bill. “I think the remedies are what people debate about. And since it’s remained stubborn and hasn’t really moved, then why not try something that has been tried around the country?”

Delaware, Oregon, Massachusetts and Puerto Rico also ban employers from asking job candidates about their salary history. San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee in July extended the ban into his city by signing the Parity in Pay Ordinance, which is set to go into effect next summer. New York City and Philadelphia have similar city-wide rules.

The laws seek to address the vicious cycle of unequal pay — women make less than their male peers at their current job because they made less at the job they held before, and the one before that, Eggman said.

Her bill would not prevent job applicants from divulging their salary histories to potential employers “voluntarily and without prompting.”

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Marlene Williamson, CEO of Silicon Valley-based women’s leadership organization Watermark, agrees that wage inequality for women carries on from one job to the next. This bill could help fix that, she said.

“It sounds like this could help continue to move the dial on parity for pay for all genders,” Williamson said.

But not everyone is on board. AB 168 could make it more difficult for companies to recruit talent, said Kristina Launey, a Sacramento-based attorney who represents employers. In particular, it would make it harder for employers and potential hires to get on the same page early on about salary expectations, she said.

“It definitely would pose extreme difficulties to employers,” Launey said, “and would hurt a lot of employees as well in securing employment and securing the positions and compensation they desire.”

And there’s no guarantee AB 168 will make it off Brown’s desk. The governor vetoed a similar bill in 2015.

“I agree with the sponsors that we must endeavor to ensure that all workers are paid fairly and do not receive a lower wage because of their gender or any other immutable characteristic that has no bearing on how they will perform in their job,” he wrote in a letter to the Assembly, explaining why he didn’t sign the measure. “This bill, however, broadly prohibits employers from obtaining relevant information with little evidence that this would assure more equitable wages.”

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At the time, Brown had just signed the California Fair Pay Act — which strengthened the state’s equal pay law — and he said he wanted to give the new act a chance to work before making more changes.

Last year, supporters tried again to push through a ban on asking about a job candidate’s salary history. But that provision was removed before the new bill got to Brown’s desk, and he ended up instead signing a bill that barred an employer from justifying pay differences solely on the grounds of prior salary.

But this year, the time is right for the ban on asking for salary history, Eggman said.

“We hope this is going to be the year,” she said.