90 | Developments in Equal Pay Litigation 2025 ©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP 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.”694 Later, after the conclusion of a five-day bench trial, the court concluded that the employer had violated the EPA.695 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.”696 B.EEOC Litigation of Title VII Equal Pay Claims As noted above, the EPA overlaps with Title VII, which prohibits a broader range of discrimination on the basis of sex and also prohibits wage discrimination against other protected groups.697 The interplay between those two statutes has been the source of some interesting decisions over the past few years, including in the context of EEOC litigation. For one thing, Title VII claims are subject to an administrative exhaustion requirement that does not apply to EPA claims. Before a plaintiff can bring a Title VII claim, they must first file a charge of discrimination with the EEOC. The charge generally is a minimalistic form document that identifies the employer, the name of the individual bringing the charge, a general description of the type of discrimination, a brief statement of the harm(s) alleged, and a statement of whether similar proceedings have been instituted by any state or local agency.698 Nevertheless, the charge is an important document in EEOC litigation because that is what empowers the EEOC to investigate an employer. A question often arises as to whether and to what extent the EEOC can extend its investigation beyond the subject matter of the charge. For example, in Seif v. Board of Trustees of Alabama A&M,699 a tenured professor brought a wage discrimination claim under Title VII, alleging he was paid less than similarly situated employees due to his race, ethnicity, ancestry, and national origin. The plaintiff had filed a charge of discrimination, but he had only discussed his salary as department Chair in the charge; he did not discuss his salary before he became a Chair. The employer argued that he had not exhausted his administrative remedies with respect to any claim based on his time as a member of the faculty before he made Chair.700 The court held that the purpose of the exhaustion requirement is to give the EEOC the first opportunity to investigate alleged discriminatory practices. “Given the purpose of the administrative exhaustion 694 Id. at *7. 695 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. 696 Id. at *11. 697 Title VII makes it unlawful for an employer to “fail or refuse to hire or to discharge any individual, or otherwise to discriminate against any individual with respect to his compensation, terms, conditions, or privileges of employment,” or “to limit, segregate, or classify his employees or applicants for employment in any way which would deprive or tend to deprive any individual of employment opportunities or otherwise adversely affect his status as an employee,” because of such individual's sex. See 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-2(a)(1)-(2). 698 29 C.F.R. § 1601.12. 699 Seif v. Bd. of Trs. of Ala. A&M, No. 5:15-cv-02374-MHH, 2022 WL 4376730 (N.D. Ala. Aug. 17, 2022). 700 Id. at *6.
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