28 | Developments in Equal Pay Litigation 2026 ©2026 Seyfarth Shaw LLP different animal entirely” than the public corruption and similar crimes that were investigated by her chosen comparators in the Special Prosecutions Division.168 And in Dass v. City University of New York,169 the district court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a self-defeating EPA complaint because its specific factual allegations disproved its generalized claims of similarity. Specifically, the plaintiff’s complaint acknowledged 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.170 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 they were required to produce similar types of video projects as their comparators.171 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.172 Another court found that although plaintiff and alleged comparators held the same job title, their work was not sufficiently similar because the plaintiff made sales through an exclusive contract, which eliminated any sales competition, while the alleged comparators did not make sales through exclusive contracts.173 Moreover, many courts have been willing to dismiss a plaintiffs’ allegations at the pleading stage when 168 Id. at *7. The court held that a distinction should be made between general training and education required for an investigator position generally versus the specific training and expertise required of certain investigators. “A lawyer or detective trained for or mostly familiar with one—and who has excelled in that particular area of law—will not necessarily possess the expertise required to thrive in the other, at least without some extended and specialized training.” Id. The different levels of skill required meant that those jobs were not “virtually identical” as the EPA requires. Id. at *8. 169 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. 170 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. 171 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.”). 172 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”). 173 Traudt v. Data Recognition Corp., No. 23-10498, 2024 WL 366168, at *2 (5th Cir. Jan. 31, 2024).
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