In recent years, states and municipalities across the country have enacted a host of laws designed to promote pay equity. In tandem with these developments, various courts have issued employee-friendly decisions that strengthen the force of the longstanding federal Equal Pay Act (EPA).
Drawing on this proliferation of legislation and rulings, we offer a number of concrete steps that employers, including law firms, can take to close the gender wage gap and build a more equitable workforce.
Many employers think too narrowly when deciding which employees deserve equal pay.
The EPA mandates equal pay for equal work—but equal work need not be identical. As the U.S. Supreme Court declared decades ago in 1974, a plaintiff must only demonstrate that her and her comparator’s jobs are “substantially equal.”
In this vein, a number of federal courts have thought broadly about which employees deserve equal pay.
As examples, courts have allowed EPA cases to move forward where the pay disparities involved athletic coaches who coached different sports, professors who worked in different departments, and employees with the disparate titles of student...
Not even a week after his last serious on-air apology, Stephen A. Smith is right back at it. In a video posted to his YouTube channel over the weekend, Smith offered a correction and apology to ES...