It’s been well over a year since the innumerable tech companies based in California had to start complying with the state’s pay transparency law, forcing many employers to show their hand in an industry where the competition for talent can be fierce. The law in California—along with other states that have taken a similar approach to pay transparency, such as New York and Colorado—requires most employers to include reasonable salary ranges in job listings.

These laws do not, however, apply to other remuneration like equity, which can be a key part of the overall compensation picture in industries like tech. This week, Airbnb announced that all of its employees will now have insight into the equity awards they are eligible to receive, as determined by a combination of factors, from their role and level to the outcome of their performance reviews. The decision builds on Airbnb’s existing pay transparency policy, which was introduced last year and allowed employees to see the pay range for their role, as well as the bonus target.

Airbnb had already started posting pay ranges on job postings in 2022, likely in anticipation of the legal shift in California. (The state’s pay transparency law went into effect at the start of 2023, though Colorado has enforced its own law since 2021.) Even so, among major tech companies, Airbnb is a bit of an outlier. While there are smaller startups that embraced pay transparency before any kind of legal requirement, the practice is still not common among big players in tech.

That doesn’t seem to have changed just yet, even with the advent of pay transparency laws. In fact, as Fast Company reported recently, some tech companies and other large employers continue to interpret pay transparency requirements rather loosely, providing huge salary ranges that could run afoul of the law. In New York City, state agencies have already filed complaints against companies who have employed this tactic, arguing they were in violation of the city law, which dictates that pay ranges must be made “in good faith.”

It’s possible companies like Airbnb are partly responding to internal pressure. When pay transparency laws in states like California and New York went into effect, many employers underestimated the extent to which it would cause internal conflict, once workers started checking their own compensation against the pay ranges in public job listings. Some companies have had to make compensation adjustments in response—or at the very least, field some difficult questions from employees.

As more states have passed legislation, it could also be a strategic decision for companies to adopt some degree of pay transparency, rather than navigating a complex patchwork of state laws. Eight states have already adopted some type of pay transparency law, while several others are on the verge of enacting their own version or are looking to pass bills this year.

But it’s also been well-documented that equity is typically not distributed evenly at startups, further exacerbating pay disparities on the basis of race and gender. In its 2023 Annual Equity Report, the fintech startup Carta found that equity value was still doled out much like it was in 2014, with white employees—particularly white men—receiving a much larger share of overall equity. Airbnb’s decision to provide more transparency around equity awards could be a sign that tech companies are starting to recognize how pay disparities can extend to all aspects of compensation.