22 | Developments in Equal Pay Litigation ©2024 Seyfarth Shaw LLP York,161 the district court for the Southern District of New York dismissed an EPA complaint because its allegations of other forms of discrimination undercut plaintiff’s claim that she was “similarly situated” to other employees who did not suffer such discrimination. The plaintiff’s complaint was self-defeating because it acknowledged that the plaintiff, an Athletic Director, performed tasks and responsibilities outside the scope of an Athletic Director’s responsibilities and had a smaller staff than other Athletic Directors.162 The variety of factual circumstances or job duties that courts have relied upon to find that work was not “equal” for purposes of an EPA violation are as wide and vast as the American workplace itself. Differences in outcome often come down to the facts plaintiffs or employers can successfully marshal in their favor. To take just a few recent examples: one court decided that newsroom photographers performed equal work, despite variations in the type and amount of video editing required by their individual jobs because, among other things, their performance evaluations showed that they were required to produce similar types of video projects as their comparators.163 Another held that, even though plaintiff and her alleged comparator held the same job title, their work was not sufficiently similar because her comparator was handling about six or seven different clients and six or seven different service lines compared to plaintiff’s one, and managed more revenue and supervised more employees than plaintiff.164 Moreover, many courts have been willing to dismiss a plaintiffs’ allegations at the pleading stage, where the complaint makes conclusory or boilerplate allegations of similarity without describing job details in sufficient detail.165 Formal Job Classifications and Hierarchies. Most often, courts look to specific job duties to determine whether employees’ work is truly equal, and they will discount formal corporate hierarchies or pay grades if they do not reflect the true nature of the work performed by employees. But where such differences are 161 Dass v. City Univ. of N.Y., No. 18-cv-11325 (VSB), 2020 WL 1922689 (S.D.N.Y. Apr. 21, 2020). In that case, a female Athletic Director of a community college alleged she was paid substantially less than other Athletic Directors in the same university system. Id. at *1. The Court held that her allegations were insufficient, noting that “Plaintiff's allegations reveal that all of the other Athletic Directors referenced in the complaint worked at different colleges in the CUNY system, which has twenty-five different educational institutions,” and that she “does not allege any facts suggesting that her position, experience, skills, and responsibilities were substantially equal to those of the male Athletic Directors at these different CUNY schools, or that she performed equal work.” Id. at *6. 162 The court concluded that “Plaintiff's claim cannot proceed on these bare allegations of general job descriptions and her belief that other Athletic Directors were ‘similarly situated,’ especially given the specific factual allegations indicating that Plaintiff's position, and job responsibilities, were unique.” Id. at *7. 163 See Galligan v. Detroit Free Press, 436 F. Supp. 3d 980, 993 (E.D. Mich. 2020) (holding that newsroom photographers’ work was equal despite different amounts of time spent editing different levels of video projects: “given the substantial overlap in overall work performed by [plaintiff and comparator], the one modest difference concerning percentage of time that each of them spent editing photos does not compel a finding, as a matter of law, that [plaintiff and comparator] do not perform equal work,” but finding that their work was different than reporters in the same newsroom). See also Crain v. Judson Indep. Sch. Dist., No. SA-16-cv-832-XR, 2018 WL 5315219, at *11 (W.D. Tex. Oct. 26, 2018) (granting summary judgment to employer where “Plaintiff's job as an aide did not require him to possess professional teaching skills and that other aides and supervisors at Adventure Club were not professional teachers. Adventure Club employees were subject to a different employee manual than ACE teachers. As noted by [employer], Plaintiff's own summary-judgment evidence demonstrates that Adult & Community Education and Adventure club were separate departments and that Adult & Community Education employees such as [comparator] were paid different rates than the Adventure Club employees”); Stephens v. Bd. of Trs. of the Univ. of S. Fla., No. 8:17-cv-53-T-23AAS, 2018 WL 4823125, at *3 (M.D. Fla. Oct. 4, 2018) (holding that clinical physician had failed to establish “equal work” because plaintiff’s own argument “about the termination of her administrative stipends—compensation for non-clinical work—renders invalid a comparison between [plaintiff] and her male colleagues. [Plaintiff] spent half her time on non-clinical work; her male colleagues spent all their time on clinical work.”). 164 Whitlock v. Williams Lea, Inc., No. 16-cv-6347, 2019 WL 1382267, at *5 (N.D. Ill. Mar. 27, 2019) (finding that although Senior Account Managers shared common general duties of supervising direct and indirect reports for one or multiple clients across various service lines and ensuring delivery of the contract services, plaintiff’s comparator’s work was not equal because he supervised many more clients and employees: “[p]erhaps the differences that [employer] identified are somehow insignificant—like maybe it did not take much effort to supervise employees, so the difference in the number of supervisees was insignificant to the job—but [plaintiff] has not provided any such evidence”). 165 See, e.g., Kairam v. West Side GI, LLC, 793 F. App’x 23, 26 (2d Cir. 2019) (upholding district court’s dismissal of EPA claim brought by physician plaintiff because “[t]he [complaint] alleges details about [plaintiff’s] position, including, among other things, that she analyzed patterns to see whether particular doctors were experiencing problems with particular insurers,” and “analyzed denials to improve billing procedures,” but with respect to her comparator, she merely alleged that he was paid to run a practice that “involved administrative duties at [the same employer]”).
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy OTkwMTQ4