From Law.com
The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission on Friday sued the University of Denver, alleging its law school underpaid at least eight female law professors compared with their male colleagues.
The agency in August 2015 issued a finding that the private law school had violated the Equal Pay Act, but the university said at the time that it planned to mediate a resolution.
Those efforts failed, according to the suit, filed in U.S. District Court for Colorado. Last year, attorneys representing the law school’s female professors said the university owed them as much as $1.2 million in back wages.
“The Commission was unable to secure from Defendant an agreement acceptable to the Commission through the conciliation process,” according to the complaint.
Officials from the university and the commission did not immediately respond to calls for comment.
University of Denver Sturm College of Law professor Lucy Marsh filed a complaint with the commission in 2013 after learning from former dean Martin Katz that she was the lowest-paid full-time professor at the school, where she had worked since 1976. The previous year, Katz issued a memo outlining raise allocations intended to keep salaries competitive that said female faculty on average earned salaries nearly $16,000 less than their male colleagues.
At a subsequent meeting with at least five female law professors, Katz speculated that the pay disparity may be the result of the women “not performing as well as male full professors,” the complaint alleges. Women make up 42 percent of the school’s full-time faculty.
The commission concluded that in October 2013 the average salary for female full-time law professors at Denver was $139,940, while men earned an average $159,721—a difference of nearly $20,000 and a “statistically significant amount,” according to the suit. No female law professors earned salaries that were greater than the average among men, the commission found.
According to the suit, Marsh has been underpaid since she started at the law school, almost 40 years ago. She was hired as an assistant professor at a salary of $16,800, while a male professor was hired in the same position the same year for $19,000, the suit alleges. By 2013, Marsh was earning $111,977 a year, while that same male colleague made $75,000 more.
The university has previously attributed Marsh’s lower pay to her job performance, including her teaching and scholarship. Her lawyers countered that Marsh was awarded the school’s Excellence in Teaching award in 2010.
After the commission released its finding last year, the university pointed to an independent consultant’s report that law school faculty pay is based on current rank, performance evaluations, administrative roles and age when a faculty member’s current rank was attained. Any links between pay and gender were too weak to draw conclusions, the consultant found.
The commission’s suit seeks to enjoin the university from paying women lower wages, to pay back wages to female professors who have been underpaid, and recover punitive damages.
