©2026 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Developments in Equal Pay Litigation 2026 | 27 district court’s decision, holding that a reasonable jury could hold that plaintiff and her comparators share the same “overall job,” since they are all full professors in the Psychology Department and they “all conduct research, teach classes, advise students, and ‘serve actively on departmental, college, and university committees and in other roles in service to the institution.’”161 Notably, however, the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning applied to professors within the same academic discipline and department; it did not extend to all professors across the university regardless of academic field or department.162 In Goodwin v. Grisham,163 the director of a state Educational Retirement Board alleged, among other things, that she was paid less than the male State Investment Officer, which she alleged was a comparable position. The court held otherwise, basing its analysis on the relevant statutes and regulations relating to those positions, which demonstrated that those jobs were not equal in terms of the type of work they entailed. Among other things, the court found that the State Investment Officer was primarily responsible for managing and investing public money, but that was “not so unambiguously the heart of the ERB Director’s duties.”164 The court dismissed plaintiff’s complaint, concluding: “ Simply put, [plaintiff’s] allegations suggest the ERB Director is a manager with some investment oversight, while the State Investment Officer is an investor with some management duties. It follows that the skill set demanded and the pool of talent drawn from would be distinct enough to anticipate differences in compensation.”165 Attorneys and other legal professionals have also found it difficult to establish this element of a prima facie case. For example, in Tolton v. Jones Day,166 the District Court for the District of Columbia held that associate attorneys of a large law firm did not necessarily perform equal work as other associates in the same class year if they did not work in the same geographic area or the same practice group. Similarly, in Smith v. Office of the Attorney General, State of Alabama,167 the District Court for the Middle District of Alabama held that the work of criminal investigators who focused on different types of crimes did not perform equal work. The court held that the plaintiff failed to establish a prima facie case of wage discrimination because her work investigating crimes of violence against women and children were “a advising and other roles that make up the bread and butter of a university education may be paid according to a pay scale that has not kept up with the market demand that influences how much a university has to pay to attract top talent. Id. The district court then analyzed plaintiff’s comparators in detail, holding with respect to each one that the differences in their job duties and other related activities, as well as their frequency and success with respect to the submission of grant applications, justified the salary discrepancies among those professors. Id. at 1291-94. 161 Freyd, 990 F.3d at 1221. The Ninth Circuit also noted that the university itself regularly compares faculty members when making salary decisions. Responding to an argument in a dissenting opinion, the court held that “the granularity with which the dissent picks through the facts would gut the Equal Pay Act for all but the most perfunctory of tasks. The Equal Pay Act, however, is ‘broadly remedial,’ and should be so ‘construed and applied’ as to be ‘workable across the broad range of industries covered by the Act.’” Id. at 1222. 162 See also EEOC v. George Washington Univ., No. 17-cv-1978, 2019 WL 2028398, at *4 (D.D.C. May 8, 2019) (denying an employer’s motion to dismiss even though the complaint at issue did not explicitly allege how the positions at issue were equal with respect to skill, effort, and responsibility, holding that the complaint “straightforwardly pleads that [plaintiff] was paid less as Executive Assistant than [comparator] was paid as a Special Assistant for substantially the same job responsibilities”); EEOC v. Univ. of Miami, No. 19-cv-23131-Civ-Scola, 2019 WL 6497888, at *2 (S.D. Fla. Dec. 3, 2019) (denying a motion to dismiss claims brought by professors in the same department because the EEOC had supported its claims of pay discrimination with numerous allegations relating to the professors’ job duties, such as teaching classes and publishing books and articles, and allegations that the female professor had two more years of teaching experience and had published more works, and because the EEOC had alleged that both professors were in the same department and had been promoted to full professor at the same time after a review by the same committee based on the same criteria). 163 Goodwin v. Grisham, No. 1:21-cv-00483-JHR-KK, 2023 WL 3569067 (D.N.M. May 19, 2023). 164 Id. at *7. 165 Id. at *8. 166 Tolton v. Jones Day, No. 19-cv-945 (RDM), 2020 WL 2542129 (D.D.C. May 19, 2020). In that case, a group of female attorneys alleged a variety of theories of sex discrimination against their former law firm employer. The court held that some of the plaintiffs had alleged sufficient facts to state an EPA claim, while others did not. In particular, the court did not credit plaintiffs’ allegations that they were not paid “Cravath market pay” because they had failed to allege that all of the employer’s offices around the country operated in the same “market,” or that the market they were referring to would have applied to offices outside of New York. Id. at *30. But the court did allow the claims of some plaintiffs to proceed where they plausibly alleged that they earned less than male comparators who were at their same level and performed similar work. Id. 167 Smith v. Office of the Att’y Gen., State of Ala., No. 2:17-cv-00297-RAH, 2020 WL 4015622 (M.D. Ala. July 16, 2020). In that case, an investigator with the Office of the Attorney General of Alabama alleged she was paid less than male comparators who worked in a different division of the same office.
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