©2025 Seyfarth Shaw LLP Developments in Equal Pay Litigation 2025 | 73 that this evidence was sufficient for a reasonable jury to conclude that prohibited discrimination was at least one of the motivating factors in her termination.550 The exact timing of events is often critical to the causation analysis. For example, in Schottel v. Nebraska State College System,551 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.552 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.”553 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 decisionmaker responsible for the investigation had been unaware of her complaints.554 On the other hand, when an adverse action follows closely after a plaintiff’s protected activity, this can be powerful evidence to establish a causal link between the two events. For example, in Donathan v. Oakley Grain, Inc.,555 a female employee alleged that her employer terminated her in retaliation for complaining that she had not received bonuses in line with other employees in similar positions, and that new employees were starting at higher rates of pay. Plaintiff was laid off approximately eight days later.556 The Eighth Circuit held that: “[plaintiff] was terminated from her office position even though [employer] had not included the office position in its seasonal layoffs any of the prior three years that [plaintiff] had worked for the company (or during the years when [plaintiff’s] predecessor held the post). Plaintiff’s termination occurred despite the absence of negative reviews, and [employer] hired [replacement] to fill the position the very next working day.”557 Retaliation claims under Title VII and the EPA are often analyzed under the same burden-shifting framework. The outcome under either statute often comes down to the credibility of the employer’s reasons for the alleged adverse action. For example, in Carlson v. Qualtek Wireless LLC,558 the court rejected a retaliation claim because it was unwilling to second guess the business judgment of the employer. In that case, a Finance Manager alleged she was refused a promotion and then fired due to 550 Id. at *5. 551 Schottel v. Neb. State Coll. Sys., 42 F.4th 976 (8th Cir. 2022). 552 Id. at 983-84. 553 Id. at 984 (quoting Wilson v. Ark. Dep't of Hum. Servs., 850 F.3d 368, 373 (8th Cir. 2017)). 554 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 that 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”). 555 Donathan v. Oakley Grain, Inc., 861 F.3d 735 (8th Cir. 2017). 556 Id. at 737. As further evidence of the time-causation connection, the Eighth Circuit noted that ten minutes after Plaintiff put her complaints in an email to the president of the company, the president forwarded her email to plaintiff’s manager, and they discussed her complaint by phone. Id. 557 Id. at 740-41. 558 Carlson v. Qualtek Wireless LLC, No. 22-cv-125, 2022 WL 3229399 (E.D. Pa. Aug. 10, 2022).
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