©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Developments in Equal Pay Litigation 2025 | 27 In Goodwin v. Grisham,162 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 were comparable positions. 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.”163 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.”164 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,165 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,166 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 different animal entirely” than the public corruption and similar crimes that were investigated by her chosen comparators in the Special Prosecutions Division.167 And in Dass v. City University of New York,168 the district court for the Southern District of New York dismissed an EPA complaint because its allegations of other forms of discrimination undercut plaintiff’s claim that she was “similarly situated” to other employees who did not suffer such discrimination. The plaintiff’s complaint was self-defeating because it acknowledged that the plaintiff, an Athletic Director, performed tasks and responsibilities 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). 162 Goodwin v. Grisham, No. 1:21-cv-00483-JHR-KK, 2023 WL 3569067 (D.N.M. May 19, 2023). 163 Id. at *7. 164 Id. at *8. 165 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. 166 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. 167 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. 168 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.
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