©2026 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Developments in Equal Pay Litigation 2026 | 75 defenders by using only one of the part-timer’s names. Given these facts, the court held that plaintiff’s arguments ignored the reality that the county had been receiving reimbursement for all part-timers since the switch was made.578 The court also rejected plaintiff’s claims of a wide-ranging conspiracy, premised on the county’s alleged botched execution of its strategy to convert one full-time position into several parttime positions, holding that “[i]n hindsight, it is apparent that [the Judge’s] assessment [i.e., the judge who made the decision to switch to part-time public defenders] was plagued by incomplete information and untested assumptions. But even so, that is not enough to establish pretext.”579 In another recent case, Carmody v. New York University,580 an emergency room physician was able to survive summary judgment by producing evidence that she was terminated in retaliation for her complaints about gender discrimination. The employer argued it was because she had falsified a patient record; she allegedly wrote that she had examined a patient, before signing off on the patient’s treatment, when she had not. However, plaintiff was able to show that what she was accused of doing was common and that other male physicians had not been disciplined after doing something similar.581 The court held this evidence was sufficient for a reasonable jury to conclude that prohibited discrimination was at least one of the motivating factors in her termination.582 The exact timing of events and knowledge of the decision-maker are often critical to the causation analysis. For example, in Schottel v. Nebraska State College System,583 a college instructor alleged retaliation under Title VII because she was terminated after complaining about pay discrimination. The employer argued that her termination was due to, among other things, how she managed her class. Plaintiff’s complaint about pay discrimination was made less than three weeks before her employer started the investigation that eventually led to her termination.584 Despite this close temporal proximity, the Eighth Circuit held that plaintiff had failed to establish causation because her employer had presented a “’lawful, obvious alternative explanation for the alleged conduct’ that renders [plaintiff’s] theory of causation based on temporal proximity implausible.”585 Moreover, she had failed to show that the employer’s proffered reason for her termination—the way she managed her classes—was a pretext. The record showed that the decision-maker responsible for the investigation had been unaware of her complaints.586 578 Id. at *18. 579 Id. at *19. 580 Carmody v. N.Y. Univ., No. 21-cv-8186(LGS), 2023 WL 5803432 (S.D.N.Y. Sept. 7, 2023). 581 Id. at *4. 582 Id. at *5. 583 Schottel v. Neb. State Coll. Sys., 42 F.4th 976 (8th Cir. 2022). 584 Id. at 983-84. 585 Id. at 984 (quoting Wilson v. Ark. Dep't of Hum. Servs., 850 F.3d 368, 373 (8th Cir. 2017)). 586 Id. The Fourth Circuit came to a similar conclusion in Coleman v. Schneider Elec. USA, 755 F. App’x 247 (4th Cir. 2019). In that case, the Fourth Circuit held that “the relevant date is when the decisionmakers learned of [plaintiff’s] protected activity,” and noted the adverse action happened more than one year after they learned about Plaintiff’s EEOC charge, the alleged cause for retaliation. Id. at 250. Moreover, plaintiff had been unable to point to any other evidence of retaliatory animus. The court noted that she had been given an above-average performance review after her EEOC charge, which “undercut[] any inference that [plaintiff’s supervisor] acted with retaliatory animus when he issued the disputed performance evaluation.” Id. See also Oulia v. Florida Dep’t of Transp., No. 18-cv-25110-Scola, 2020 WL 2084998, at *5 (S.D. Fla. Apr. 30, 2020) (granting summary judgment in favor of an employer because, although the plaintiff had complained about unequal opportunity to work overtime to her manager, she had not produced evidence that her manager had communicated that complaint to her supervisor, who was the decision-maker regarding her termination; this was “fatal to her attempted prima facie retaliation claim”); Sharkey v. Fortress Sys., Int’l, No. 3:18-cv-19-FDWDCK, 2019 WL 3806050, at *5 (W.D.N.C. Aug. 13, 2019) (granting summary judgment against a female employee who alleged she was terminated after she refused to agree to a new compensation plan that would have reduced her base salary and increased her commission; plaintiff claimed she was terminated because she would not agree to the reduced compensation, but the court held that she was selected for the reduced compensation package before she complained about it, even though her termination occurred after); Yearns v. Koss Constr. Co., No. 17-cv-4201-C-WJE, 2019 WL 191656, at *5 (W.D. Mo. Jan. 14, 2019) (holding that the length of time between the alleged protected activity and adverse action showed that the two were not causally connected because her complaint came two months before her layoff: “Even assuming the June 2015 Complaint occurred on the last day of June, over eight weeks passed until her August layoff. This lengthy time period weakens any potential causal link”).
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