California FEHA: Whippy's Independent Bias Audit

California doesn't require a bias audit by name, but its regulators explicitly weigh anti-bias testing when deciding liability. That distinction matters if you're evaluating Whippy against FEHA: our AI recruiter is independently and continuously audited anyway, precisely because "we didn't test" is a worse position than "here's our testing" if a hiring decision is ever challenged. Here's how the audit works, and where to see the current results.

The Law Behind the Question

On October 1, 2025, California's Civil Rights Council finalized regulations governing employers' use of automated-decision systems (ADS) under the Fair Employment and Housing Act (FEHA). Unlike NYC Local Law 144, California's regulations don't mandate a specific audit format or frequency. What they do make clear is that using an ADS that discriminates against applicants or employees on a protected basis violates the law, whether or not that discrimination was intentional.

The regulations apply broadly: to any employer, employment agency, or labor organization using an ADS to make or facilitate decisions around recruiting, screening, interviewing, hiring, or promotion. That reach matters. Unlike Local Law 144, which applies specifically to employers in New York City, FEHA's ADS regulations apply to any employer operating in California, regardless of where the hiring tool itself was built or is based.

Bias testing isn't mandatory under these regulations, but it's directly relevant to how a discrimination claim gets defended. The regulations explicitly recognize that the quality, effectiveness, recency, and scope of an employer's anti-bias testing is a factor in assessing liability.

How Whippy Is Audited Against It

Warden AI runs the audit, independently of Whippy's product team, using two complementary methods: disparate impact analysis to compare selection and scoring rates across demographic groups, and counterfactual analysis to test whether changing a single protected characteristic alone changes an otherwise identical candidate's outcome. See Whippy AI Recruiter: Independent Bias Audit Results for the full breakdown of how each method works.

FEHA's protected categories are broader than Local Law 144's, and which characteristics get tested depends on the specific audit, the available data, and the applicable law. Warden's audit for Whippy assesses characteristics such as race/ethnicity, sex, age, disability, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, and pregnancy status, among others relevant to FEHA. For the exact characteristics covered in the current audit cycle, the live report is the source of truth, not this page.

What This Gives You, Precisely

Testing across both group-level and individual-level methods, rather than one approach alone, is what gives this audit weight: it's independent, ongoing, third-party evidence of how Whippy's AI recruiter actually performs against the categories FEHA is concerned with.

None of this makes Whippy "certified" or "compliant" under FEHA; no vendor audit can make that claim on its own, since compliance depends on your own deployment and practices too. What the audit does give you is documented evidence of testing quality, effectiveness, recency, and scope, the exact factors FEHA's regulations point to when evaluating a defense.

See the Current Results

Warden re-runs this audit on a recurring basis, so what you'll find isn't a static result from months ago, it's current. Review the full California-specific report, methodology, and latest findings across all tested categories on Warden's public dashboard, hosted independently of Whippy.

Warden's AI Assurance Dashboard →

Beyond California

California's ADS regulations are among the broadest in reach of any current AI employment law, but they're not the only ones Whippy tests against. If your hiring spans multiple states, here's the rest of our state-by-state breakdown:

• Whippy AI Recruiter: Independent Bias Audit Results →

• NYC Local Law 144 →

• Colorado SB 26-189 →

• Illinois HB 3773 →

• EU AI Act →

Whippy is an AI-powered communication and recruiting platform built to help teams move faster without sacrificing quality or fairness.