68 | Developments in Equal Pay Litigation ©2023 Seyfarth Shaw LLP 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.564 Accordingly, the university’s motion for summary judgment was denied. Written policies regarding salary scales and job categories often factor into equal pay cases, as employers often rely on those policies to prove that salaries were set according to such policies and are therefore not discriminatory. 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.565 According to the employer, that policy is facially neutral, and clearly permitted the employer to pay the starting salaries that it did.566 The court held, however, that the MAPS policy left open the possibility that the employer could apply discretion with respect to setting starting salaries.567 Applying Maryland Insurance Administration, 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.”568 After the conclusion of a five-day bench trial, the court concluded that the employer had violated the EPA.569 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.570 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.571 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.”572 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.573 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 564 Id. 565 EEOC v. Enoch Pratt Free Library, No. 17-cv-2860, 2019 WL 5593279, at *3 (D. Md. Oct. 30, 2019). 566 Id. at *6. 567 Id. 568 Id. at *7. 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); EEOC v. Denton Cty., No. 4:17-cv-614, 2018 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 175794, at *22 (E.D. Tex. Oct. 12, 2018) (denying cross motions for summary judgment, holding that it was “not convinced that [defendant] or the EEOC has met their respective burdens demonstrating that there is no material issue of fact as to the EEOC's claim for violation of the Equal Pay Act entitling it to judgment as a matter of law”). 569 EEOC v. Enoch Pratt Free Library, No. 8:17-cv-2860, 2020 WL 7640845 (D. Md. Dec. 23, 2020). 570 Id. at *8. 571 Id. at *9. 572 Id. (emphasis in original). 573 Id. at *10.
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