Sixty years ago Congress passed the Equal Pay Act, which has resulted in significant gains for female employees toward achieving “equal pay for equal work.”
The Equal Pay Act prohibits a company from paying unequal wages to men versus women for “equal work on jobs the performance of which requires equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and which are performed under similar working conditions.” 29 U.S.C. 206(d)(1).
The goal of the Equal Pay Act is to shrink the pay gap between men and women who perform the same or very similar jobs. Notably, the jobs do not have to be identical and courts will examine the actual work performed, rather than the job title, to determine if jobs are “substantially equal,” and thus covered by the Equal Pay Act.
Likewise, the Equal Pay Act covers obvious pay such as salary and wages, as well as overtime pay, stock options, bonuses, and vacation leave and other employment benefits.
To win an Equal Pay Act, the employee must first demonstrate that they:
were performing “substantially equal work on the job, the performance of which required substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility as the jobs held by members of the opposite sex;”
“the job was performed under similar working conditions” and
were “paid at a lower wage than members of the opposite sex.”
Cornish v. District of Columbia, 67 F.Supp.3d 345, 360-61 (D.D.C. 2014).
If the employee makes this...
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