82 | Developments in Equal Pay Litigation ©2024 Seyfarth Shaw LLP prestigious journals than the male professor, the Dean had admitted he had not reviewed her salary increases or the reasons for the amounts that had been awarded in each year, thus undercutting the university’s explanation.675 Moreover, the court did find evidence of gender disparities at the university, including evidence that it placed a higher service requirement on female professors and had proactively increased male professors’ salaries to close the gap with female professors, but had not done so for the charging party, despite the fact that her Department Chair had conceded she was “grossly underpaid.”676 Accordingly, the university’s motion for summary judgment was denied. This was a significant victory for the EEOC at the time, and the court’s decision remains relatively bad precedent for employers. But on March 23, 2022, the court entered judgment in favor of the university after a jury found in its favor after trial on the merits.677 The EEOC has also recently taken aim at defenses that rely on written policies regarding salary scales and job categories. For example, in Enoch Pratt Free Library, the employer pointed out that it used a Managerial and Professional Society Salary Policy (“MAPS”) to determine compensation for newly hired library supervisors.678 According to the employer, that policy is facially neutral, and clearly permitted the employer to pay the starting salaries that it did.679 The court held, however, that the MAPS policy left open the possibility that the employer could apply discretion with respect to setting starting salaries.680 The court concluded that “[the EEOC’s comparator] was hired at a rate not only higher than the female [library supervisors] represented by the EEOC, but also significantly above the salary he had received during his first tenure at [employer]. Given these facts, combined with the inherent discretion within the MAPS policy, genuine factual questions exist about how defendants arrived at [the comparator’s] salary.”681 Later, after the conclusion of a five-day bench trial, the court concluded that the employer had violated the EPA.682 The court held that “implementation of a public pay system alone cannot justify pay disparity in the absence of any other justification,” and that “mere reliance on MAPS in combination with the record evidence, does not establish that [comparator] was hired based on a factor other than sex.”683 675 Id. at *10. 676 Id. at *11. Turning to the Title VII claim, the court held that “[b]ecause the EEOC has established its disparate pay claim under the more rigorous analysis of the Equal Pay Act, the court finds that it has met its initial burden of showing its prima facie case under Title VII.” Id. at *12. The court also found that the university met its burden to articulate legitimate bases for the alleged pay disparity, but, for the same reasons that doomed the university’s defense to the EPA claim, also held that the EEOC had “advanced sufficient evidence to cast doubt on the University's purportedly legitimate basis for the pay differential,” thus meeting its burden to show that those reasons were pretextual. Id. 677 Judgment, EEOC v. Univ. of Miami, No. 19-cv-23131-Scola (S.D. Fla. Mar. 23, 2022), ECF No. 203. 678 EEOC v. Enoch Pratt Free Library, No. 17-cv-2860, 2019 WL 5593279, at *3 (D. Md. Oct. 30, 2019). 679 Id. at *6. 680 Id. 681 Id. at *7. 682 EEOC v. Enoch Pratt Free Library, No. 8:17-cv-2860, 2020 WL 7640845 (D. Md. Dec. 23, 2020). The EEOC easily met its burden to establish a prima facie case because the parties stipulated that the comparator’s salary was higher than that of each charging party. Id. at *8. The employer argued that each library branch differed with respect to circulation size, outreach efforts, and physical footprint, thus rendering the job duties of each library supervisor too dissimilar to support a finding that they performed equal work. The court found, however, that the core job duties were the same, relying in part on evidence that the positions shared the same job description, and supervisors often substituted for one another on a short- or long-term basis without requiring any additional training and without any alteration in pay. Id. at *9. The differences among library branches did not defeat the EEOC’s case because “none of th[ose] differences translated into job duties that differed significantly from one another.” Id. (emphasis in original). The court also rejected the employer’s affirmative defense, holding that the evidence simply did not support the employer’s claim that the comparator was hired at a higher salary because he was able to negotiate a higher salary on the strength of his superior qualifications. According to the court, there was no evidence that the comparator had ever negotiated his salary. Id. at *10. The MAPS salary system also undercut this defense because, although that system permitted a salary adjustment, it does not alone independently justify paying a male employee a higher wage for performing the same work. The employer’s own HR guidance actually cautioned city agencies to be careful when setting starting salaries to the MAPS midpoint, in order to avoid “internal equity issues.” Id. Yet the employer had not been able to show that it had ever compared salaries to avoid those equity issues, and even failed to do so after one of the charging parties had complained about the disparity. The employer’s failure to act on that complaint also led the court to reject its claim that it had acted in good faith, resulting in the court awarding the charging parties liquidated damages on top of their actual damages. Id. 683 Id. at *11.
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