DU agrees to pay $2.66 million to settle unequal-pay lawsuit by 7 female profs
The University of Denver has agreed to pay $2.66 million to settle an unequalpay lawsuit brought by seven female professors at its Sturm College of Law.
The professors also will receive pay increases this year as part of the conditions of the settlement. DU also has agreed to take steps to eliminate the gender pay gap at Sturm, according to a news release by attorneys Charlotte Sweeney and Joan Bechtold, who represent six of the professors.
“This is an important victory for female professors in any university setting,” Sweeney said. “That a law school was allowed to perpetuate this level of pay disparity between men and women for decades is shocking.”
The lawsuit was initiated in 2013 by professor Lucy Marsh, who complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission alleging that Sturm paid her less than a man in a similar job and
failed to correct the inequity when it had the chance.
Her filing claimed she was the lowest-paid professor, earning $109,000 per year, compared with the median salary of $149,000. She started teaching at DU in 1973 and became a full professor in 1982 and had never asked for a raise.
In the spring of 2012, after the law school announced DU had earmarked money for faculty raises, professor Ann Scales raised concerns about gender parity and asked that the additional money be used to remedy inequities.
Raises were given, but they widened the gap, leaving female full-time professors earning a mean salary $15,859 less than male professors.
Marsh took up the charge after Scales, a founder of the field of feminist legal theory, died in June 2012. The EEOC in 2015 sued DU based on its investigation of Marsh’s claim.
On Thursday, DU released a statement that said while its lawyers were confident of their legal position, university officials were motivated to action by a strong desire to “heal our community and move forward together.”
“We believe this settlement will allow us to collectively focus on a present and a future in which the law school — and the DU community as a whole — can unite under our common values of equity, integrity and opportunity,” DU spokeswoman Theresa Ahrens said.
She added that the settlement will not impact scholarships, financial aid to students or college operations.
An outside consultant will monitor the pay for Sturm professors for six years to ensure that female law professors are not discriminated against, the settlement says. A labor economist will do annual pay equity studies.
DU must make all salaries of Sturm professors available on an internal webpage, according to the settlement.
“Pay transparency is particularly important,” Bechtold said.
DU initially claimed salaries for female and male law professors were fair without examining the pay amounts, the news release says.
“That this happened at an institution whose very job it is to teach about equality, justice and ethics is disturbing and disappointing, to say the least,” said professor Nancy Ehrenreich, a plaintiff in the lawsuit who has been teaching at DU for 29 years.
Another plaintiff in the lawsuit is professor Joyce Sterling, an expert in gender pay inequities who has taught at DU for 41 years.
“As an expert in empirical research on gender discrimination in the legal profession, I was simply stunned by the fact that I had become one of my own statistics,” she said.