Employee Survival Guide® - The Pay Gap Behind Vassar & $5 Million Settlement: Graham v. Vassar College

Episode Date: August 12, 2026

Send us Fan MailA school can celebrate women’s equality for 160 years and still run a payroll system that tells a very different story. We dig into the Vassar College pay equity case, the $5 million class action settlement, and the uncomfortable lesson for every workplace: a polished mission statement does not protect you from wage discrimination, and “progressive” branding can let a gender pay gap hide in plain sight.We walk through the public salary data reported to the Chronicle of Higher Education, why small differences in starting pay can balloon through percentage raises, and how the real losses extend beyond base pay into retirement contributions and long-term wealth. Then we trace what happens when employees try to fix it internally: warnings from surveys, requests for transparency, and the kinds of explanations that keep showing up across industries, including the negotiation myth and the merit defense.On the legal side, we explain the courtroom fight over New York’s Equal Pay Law and the 2019 shift from “equal work” to “substantially similar work,” a change that makes it harder for employers to dodge accountability with technical job-duty distinctions. We also unpack the systemic mechanics that can create disparate impact, including performance systems tied to biased student evaluations, and why the settlement’s programmatic relief matters as much as the money: independent pay equity audits, required salary adjustments, and clear access to compensation criteria.If you care about equal pay, pay transparency, and practical ways to spot red flags in compensation, this conversation is for you. Subscribe, share this with a coworker, and leave a review with your biggest takeaway, because what would you check first in your own workplace pay data? If you enjoyed this episode of the Employee Survival Guide please like us on Facebook, X and LinkedIn.  We would really appreciate if you could leave a review of this podcast on your favorite podcast player such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Leaving a review will help other employees find the Employee Survival Guide.  For more information, please contact our employment attorneys at Carey & Associates, P.C. at 203-255-4150, www.capclaw.com.Disclaimer:  For educational use only, not intended to be legal advice. 

Hey, it's Mark here. Welcome to the next edition of the Employee Survival Guide, where I tell you, as always, what your employer does definitely not want you to know about. And a lot more. Imagine applying for a job, right, at a company that is just globally famous for championing your specific rights. Oh, yeah. Like, it's their whole identity. Exactly. A place where the entire brand, the founding charter, the marketing materials, I mean, everything screams, you know, we believe in your equality. Right. You get the job. You work there for decades. You pour your heart into the mission and then you discover that for the last 20 years, they have been, well, systematically and intentionally underpaying you compared to the person sitting literally right next to you. It's awful. And when you finally ask them about it, they look you in the eye and say, well, you're just not as good as he is. It's, I mean, it's the ultimate betrayal, really. It takes the standard workplace discrimination that we see, you know, every day. And it just adds this thick, suffocating layer of institutional hypocrisy.

It really does. Which brings us to why we are here today. Welcome to another episode of the Employee Survival Guide produced by Employment Attorney Mark Carey. Glad to be here. Today, we are looking at a piece of massive news that recently sent shockways through the academic world. But honestly, it should be sending shockways through, you know, every corporate boardroom in the country. Oh, absolutely. So Vassar College, which is a historic, once female-only institution that is widely considered,

like an Ivy League equivalent, has just agreed to a $5 million class action settlement regarding the unequal pay claims of its female professors. Yeah, and we have to point out this wasn't a quick, quiet settlement where an institution just pays some money to make a small problem go away. Yeah, sweeping it under the rug. Exactly. This was the culmination of years of suppressed data, internal battles, and some truly stunning revelations about how, you know, compensation is actually managed behind closed doors.

The reason Mark Carey included this specific case in the employee survival guide is because it serves as a massive, undeniable wake-up call for you, the listener. It demonstrates a startling reality. A very harsh reality. Yeah. If illegal bias to pay men more than women exists at a liberal, historically women-centric college like Vassar, then it exists across our entire country. Yes. I mean, it is happening in Fortune 500 tech companies. It is happening in major hospital networks.

and it's definitely happening in your local school districts. Exactly. It shatters this comfortable illusion we have. We tend to think that progressive branding or, you know, a fancy liberal arts pedigree somehow inoculates an institution against systemic bias. Like they're above at all. Right. But this case proves that the data just doesn't care about your founding myth.

A brand is just a brand. The payroll is where the truth lives. So today we are going to unpack the entire anatomy of this case. We're going to just start by looking at the shocking internal data that Vassar while they tried to ignore it. They really did. And we are going to hear the personal stories of five world-class female professors who finally had enough. And we're going to explore a very specific crucial 2019 change in New York state law that actually, you know, made this victory possible. It's a change that every single employee really needs to understand.

Yes. The legal side of this is wild. And finally, we will look at the structural reforms that Vassar is. is now legally bound to implement. Right, because to really understand the gravity of what happened here, we have to start by contrasting the public face of Vassar College with the hidden mathematical reality of its payroll over the last two decades. The paradox here is what makes the betrayal so profound, I think.

It really is. Let's talk about that history because it sets the stage for everything. So Vassar was founded in 1861 by Matthew Vassar, and his explicit mission, written right into the DNA of the institution, was to provide women with an education equal to that available to men. Which, you know, back in the mid-19th century, that was a radically progressive, totally disruptive idea. It was revolutionary. And Vassar carried that mantle forward.

Like in 1926, Vassar joined what became known as the Seven Sisters. Right, the famous consortium. Exactly. This historic consortium of elite women's colleges, institutions like Barnard, Bryn Moore, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Radcliffe, and Wellesley, they banded together specifically. to combat the crises facing women's colleges at the time. And we should clarify what kind of crises we were talking about in the 1920s. Yep, please do. It was primarily financial and reputational.

They were fighting this immense societal prejudice that basically believed women didn't need or couldn't handle rigorous academic training. Just terrible stereotypes. Exactly. And because of that prejudice, these women's colleges struggled immensely to raise the endowment money necessary to, you know, hire top peer faculty and build facilities that could actually rival the Ivy League men's schools. So the Seven Sisters form this united front to legitimize and fund women's intellectual advancement. Right.

They had to stick together to survive and thrive. So the entire foundation of the college is built on the premise of fighting for parity, right? Fighting for women to have the exact same resources and respect as men. Literally their reason for existing. And even though Vassar eventually became co-educational in 1969, they still lean heavily into this legacy. I mean, if you go to their website today, they proudly identify as a pioneer for women's education. They sell this headily to prospective students. Right. They publicly assert

a deep institutional commitment to the advancement of equality between the sexes. That is not just their history. I mean, it is their modern day brand identity. But then, you know, you look at the actual spreadsheets. Yeah. The reality check. You look at the salary data that Vassar itself was required to share with the Chronicle of Higher Education. And for anyone who doesn't know, the Chronicle is essentially the main trade publication for colleges and universities, and they track institutional data. So what did this public data actually show? Well, it revealed a persistent, undeniable, and widening gender pay gap for full professors spanning two solid decades. Two decades. Wow.

The numbers, when you laid them out chronologically, they show a complete systemic failure. So in the 2003 to 2004 academic year, the average pay gap between male and female. female full professors with $7,663. Okay, so that represents a 7.6% gap. Exactly. Which is already deeply problematic. You know, if you were doing the same job, a 7.6% deficit is a major hit to your livelihood. It's huge, but the trajectory is what's truly alarming here.

By the 2010-2011 academic year, that gap hadn't shrump at all. It had ballooned to $15,052. It doubled. Basically, yeah. It grew to a 13.4% gap. And if we jump all the way ahead to the 2021 to 2022 academic year, which is the last year of available data cited in the legal complaint, the gap was still sitting at a stubborn 10%. So for roughly 20 years, this massive disparity was just like sitting there, published in a major educational journal for the whole world to see. Exactly. It wasn't a secret, you know, buried in a locked filing cabinet somewhere. It was aggregated public data.

That brings up a big question. How does an institution like Vassar, with its history and its mission statement, allow, a gap to not only exist, but to actually grow over a 20-year period. Like, what is the actual mechanic driving that widening gap? Yeah, the primary mechanic comes down to the, well, the insidious nature of percentage-based raises applied to unequal starting salaries. Okay, I want to slow down and really map this out because I feel like this is where a lot of invisible discrimination happens in the corporate world, too. It absolutely is.

So let's assume two professors are hired at the exact same time for the exact same role. One is a man, one is a woman. Vassar systematically was offering men higher starting salaries than women. Right. Let's say they offer the woman $100,000, and they offer the man $110,000. And the woman might not know what the man makes, so she just accepts the $100,000, you know, thinking it's a fair market rate. Exactly. Now, let's assume they both perform equally well, right?

They both get an identical 3% raise at the end of the year. I'm doing the math here. Three percent of the woman's $100,000 salary is a $3,000 raise. Yeah. So our new salary is $103,000. Correct. But 3% of a man's $110,000 salary is $3,300. His new salary is $113,000. Right. So in year one, the gap was $10,000. In year two, despite getting the exact same percentage raise for the exact same performance, the gap is now $10,300. It's growing. Exactly. Now, fast forward that math over a 20 or 30 year career. It's the dark side of compound interest. It's like launching two rockets into space. If their trajectories are off by even a fraction of a degree on the launch pad, by the time they reach orbit, they are thousands of miles apart.

A lower starting salary compounds exponentially. That is a perfect analogy. The raw dollar gap just gets wider and wider every single year. It snowballs into this massive chasm in lifetime earnings. Wow. And remember, it's not just the base salary. Your retirement contributions, your pension matching, your bonuses. All of those are usually calculated.

as a percentage of your base salary. Oh, man, that's true. So a gap at the time of hire literally robs a woman of hundreds of thousands of dollars in long-term wealth. Which brings up a glaring question for me. If this data is being published in the Chronicle of Higher Education, surely the women working at Vassar noticed. Yeah.

I mean, these are brilliant academics who analyze data for a living. But they definitely notice. Right. You don't just sit there for two decades and let your male colleagues buy vacation homes while you clip coupons. What happens when the female faculty actually brings this public data to the administration? And that is where the story shifts from, you know, a problem of passive systemic inertia into a story of active institutional gaslighting.

Yeah, that's the word for it. Because the female professors did not sit quietly. They actively repeatedly tried to address this through internal channels. And the decades of denial they face from the administration are truly staggering. Let's get into the timeline of that denial. Because when you read the court documents, the administrative response feels almost surreal. Like, let's look at May of 2011. Vassar holds a faculty retreat.

And the title of this retreat is incredibly specific. It was called Women in the Academy, a snapshot of indicators of the state of women faculty at Vassar. Right. And at that retreat, they presented the results of an internal climate survey. And the data was a glaring, flashing red alert for the administration. What did the survey say? They asked faculty if they were satisfied with their salary. Of the faculty members who reported being not satisfied, 62.5% were women.

Only 37.5% were men. So the dissatisfaction is overwhelmingly skewed female. It gets worse. They asked the faculty to respond to the statement. Women faculty are treated fairly at the college. A staggering 80% of the female faculty strongly disagreed with that statement. 80%. I really want to emphasize that number for a second.

If you are running an organization and 80% of demographic group tells you we are not treated fairly here, that is not a French minority complaining around the water cooler? No, not at all. That is a full-blown cultural crisis. That means every time you have a department meeting, the vast majority of the women in the room feel actively marginalized by the institution. And the steering committee that ran that retreat doesn't just present the problem. I mean, they presented solutions. They made very clear, actionable recommendations to the administration. What did they suggest?

They said, look, publish the faculty salary ranges, establish clearer guidelines for how performance evaluations are conducted, and dramatically increase transparency around compensation. So the problem is identified. The solutions are handed to them on a silver platter. What does Vassar do? They essentially buried their heads in the sand. No meaningful structural changes were implemented. Unbelievable. Which leads us to a critical escalation in September of 2013. A group of highly respected female professors decided they just couldn't wait for the college to act voluntarily anymore. Right. They saw a formal audience with the leadership, specifically then-president Catherine Cappy Bonhill and the then-acting dean of faculty, Stephen Rock.

And their goal was to directly confront the administration with the public data from the Chronicle of Higher Education. Exactly. They said, look, the public data should. shows a massive gap. We want to see the raw internal data to understand exactly where and how this is happening. And this meeting is a pivotal moment in the lawsuit, right? It is. The administration actually acknowledged that the disparity existed in the public data. They didn't deny the gap was real. But, you know, acknowledging a problem and fixing it are two very different things. Right. Because when the female professors asked for the raw data to help solve the problem, the administration just flat out

refuse to cooperate. And this leads to an email exchange that honestly made my blood boil when I read it. Oh, it's infuriating. On September 30 at 2013, Dean Stephen Rock formally writes to these women and explicitly tells them that the raw payroll data will not be released to them. But, and this is the part that is just mind-blowing, they had already given that exact same raw data to a male professor. Yes. They granted a male colleague full access to the data that they were actively hiding from the female colleagues who were, you know, being victimized by that very data. And when the women asked, like, why did you give it to him and not to us, what was the dean's justification?

Dean Rock claimed he gave the data to the male professor because that man was a, quote, world-class econometrition. I have to stop here. Because the sheer audacity of that statement requires context. Who were the women asking for this data? They were to a group of freshman undergrads taking their first statistics class. Far from it. The group of women included a world-class economist, a world-class physicist, a world-class psychologist, a world-class biologist, and two world-class historians.

These are tenured experts. Yes. People who spend their entire lives designing studies, analyzing complex data sets, and publishing peer-reviewed research. But apparently, they just weren't world-class enough to read a spreadsheet of their own salaries. Yeah, the condescension is breathtaking. It's the ultimate form of gatekeeping. It's saying, well, we will only let a man look at the evidence of how we are discriminating against women because only a man has the intellectual capacity to interpret it. It perfectly encapsulates the structural arrogance they were up against. I mean, the administration wasn't just denying them money. They were denying them agency and intellectually belittling them in the process.

So stonewalled by the administration, years go by, the compounding interest keeps ticking. We finally hit the 2020 to 2021 academic year. There is a new administration. Right. President Elizabeth Bradley is now in charge, along with a new dean of faculty, William Hoynes. And the female full professors mount another coordinated push. They gather the updated public data. They engage the new leadership. And this time, it initially looks like they might actually get somewhere.

Yes. The new administration agrees to finally conduct an internal pay equity study. They spend three months analyzing their own payroll data. And what happened? When the results come back, the study proves exactly what the women had been claiming for decades. The pay gap wasn't just real. It was completely devastating. What did the internal study actually find number-wise?

It found that the pay gap was most pronounced among the most loyal, longest-serving women at the college. For female full professors who had been serving 20 or more years post-tenure, the internal study revealed a $30,000 per year pay gap compared to their male counterpocket. parts. $30,000 every single year. Yeah. Let's do that math. If you are a senior female professor and you are being underpaid by $30,000 a year for a decade, that is $300,000 in loss-based wages alone.

And if you factor in the lost compounding interest on the retirement accounts that Vassar matches, I mean, you are looking at close to half a million dollars of lost generational wealth for one individual woman. Wow. It is life-altering money. It's the difference between retiring comfortably and working into your 70s. It's the difference between paying for your kids college and cash versus, you know, taking out massive loans. So Vassar's own internal study confirms this massive $30,000 a year deficit.

You would think the administration's reaction would be absolute panic, followed immediately by writing checks to make these women whole. You would think that. How did Dean Hoynes and President Bradley respond to their own data? They responded with what can only be described as a master class in minimization. Dean Hoynes announced they would not do a systemic adjustment. Instead, they would conduct equity reviews on a case-by-case basis. Which means forcing every single woman to individually justify why she deserves to be paid equally rather than the institution taking responsibility for fixing the system.

Exactly. And the results of these case-by-case reviews were deeply insulting. The vast majority of the women received absolutely no pay adjustment at all. You're kidding? Nope. And for the few who did, Vassar offered meager one-time raises. Some of those raises were as low as $1,000. Let me get this straight.

You proved to me that I am underpaid by $30,000 this year and underpaid by $30,000 last year, and you offer me a one-time raise of $1,000 moving forward. Yeah, that was the offer. That's not a fix. That's a rounding error. How on earth did Vassar justify this? How did they look at a $30,000 gap and say, actually, the men deserve it? This is where we get into the psychological warfare of wage discrimination. Vassar's administration fell back on two classic corporate excuses.

First, they claimed the men were simply higher performers who had earned more merit. And second, they claimed that the men were just better at negotiating their starting salaries and their attention offers. Oh, the negotiation excuse. Yeah. This one drives me absolutely crazy because it assumes a level playing field that simply does not exist. I want to look closely at this claim because the court documents reveal a level of hypocrisy that is hard to fathom. Let's look at two specific plaintiffs in this case, Professor Debra Zeifman and Professor Maria Hohn. When Vassar claimed the pay gap was due to women not negotiating, they conveniently ignored the fact that they had explicitly told these women that negotiation was forbidden.

Right. Professor Houn actually had a competing job offer from the University of Southern California that came with a significantly higher salary, didn't she? She did. She took that offer to Vassar and tried to negotiate her starting pay. And Vassar flat out told her no. They explicitly told her that Vassar College does not negotiate starting salaries. They presented it as an inflexible, institutional rule. Professor Zyfman experienced the exact same thing. She was told salaries were non-negotiable, both when she was initially hired and years later when she was awarded a prestigious deanship. But then, during the course of uncovering all this data, they find out that male colleagues were absolutely allowed to negotiate their salaries in those exact same circumstances.

Yes. men were leveraging outside offers and getting massive pay bites while women were being told, hey, it's against the rules to even ask. Oh, unbelievable. This highlights a heavily researched sociological phenomenon known as the double bind that women face in workplace negotiations. Decades of research show that when women negotiate aggressively for higher pay, they are routinely penalized. Right, because it's stereotypes. Exactly. They are viewed as difficult or demanding, or not team players, social penalties that are almost. never applied to men displaying the exact same behavior.

So they are penalized if they do ask. Right. But if they don't negotiate, they are financially penalized for the rest of their careers. It's a lose-lose scenario constructed by societal bias. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. But what makes the Vassar case so egregious is that this wasn't just a vague societal bias. The institution was actively verbally lying to women. Yes, they were. They were telling them a policy existed, we don't negate.

negotiate that did not actually exist for men. They rewarded the men who negotiated, denied the women the right to negotiate, and then publicly blamed the women for the pay gap because they didn't negotiate. It is the textbook definition of institutional gaslighting. You create the conditions for the inequality, and then you blame the victim for failing to navigate the trap you build. Okay, so the negotiation excuse is entirely bankrupt. But what about the other excuse? The administration claimed that the men simply had more merit. Right, the merit defense. They claimed the men were higher performers and therefore deserve higher pay. If an institution is going to make that claim, we have to look under the hood of their merit and promotion systems. We need to see exactly how

this discrimination was operationalized on a day-to-day basis. Because you can't just pay people differently without a paper trail. You need to mathematically justify the gap. And the way institutions do that is by using evaluation systems that appear objective and neutral on the surface but are fundamentally flawed and biased in their execution. So how does the academic machinery at Vassar actually work? Let's break down the structure of being a professor there so we understand the baseline. Okay, so Vassar has three main tiers for its tenure track faculty. Assistant professor, associate professor, and full professor.

Okay. Getting tenure is a grueling process that usually happens when moving from assistant to associate. But here is the critical fact established in the court documents. Once you are a tenured faculty member at Vassar, whether you are an associate professor or a full professor, your core job requirements are exactly the same. Meaning, there isn't some secret tier of extra work that only the highly paid men are doing. Correct. The standard load for all tenured faculty is teaching five courses per academic year. On top of that, everyone is expected to supervise student theses, conduct and publish their own

independent academic research, and actively participate in departmental and college-wide committees. The baseline job description is identical across the board. Completely identical. So if everyone is doing the exact same job, how does Vassar determine who gets more money in their annual raise? They use a merit system. Annual salary increases are broken into two parts. A standard percentage-based raise, which everyone gets, and a merit-based raise, which is variable. Vassar grades faculty performance on a four-point scale. What are the tiers of that scale?

If you are deemed to have distinction, you get three points. High merit gets you two points, merit gets you one point, and no merit gets you zero points. And these points translate into money. Yes, these points directly translate into how many extra thousands of dollars you received that year. And what did the data show about how those points were distributed between men and women? According to data pulled from Vassar's own office of institutional research, men consistently outscored women. The men averaged a merit rating of 2.41, while the women averaged 2.24. Okay, let me stop you there, because if I am listening to this, I might be thinking, hold on, if the men are mathematically scoring a 2.41 on their performance reviews and the women are scoring a 2.24, doesn't that legally justify the pay gap?

That's the logical conclusion most people jump to, yeah. Right. If the men are objectively getting higher scores on their report cards, don't they deserve higher pay? That is exactly the defense that employers rely on. They point to the spreadsheet and say, look, the math proves the men are better. But this defense relies on a massive, flawed assumption. It assumes that the scoring system itself is objective and fair. Which it isn't. Exactly. In employment law, there is a crucial concept called disparate impact.

What does disparate impact actually mean in plain English? It occurs when an employer uses a policy, a test, or a metric that looks completely neutral on its face. But in practice, it has a disproportionate negative impact on a legally protected class-like women or minorities. So it's like a rigfoot race. Let's say an employer decides who gets a promotion by having everyone run 100 meter dash. Okay. On paper, that sounds perfectly neutral and merit-based. Whoever runs the fastest wins.

But secretly, the employer forces all the female candidates to run while wearing a 20-pound weighted vest. Right, right. When the men crossed the finish line first, the employer points to the stopwatch and says, see, the men are naturally faster. They deserve the promotion. The stopwatch isn't lying about the time, but the race itself was inherently rigged. That is a phenomenal analogy. The metric itself is corrupted by an underlying condition. So the question becomes, what was the weighted vest in Vassar's merit system?

What metric were they using to determine these scores? And the answer to that is something that every college student in America is familiar with. Yes. A massive component of a professor's merit rating at Vassar was based on student course evaluations. Oh, wow. These are often referred to as CEQs or course evaluation questionnaires. It's the survey students fill out at the end of the semester. rating how much they like the professor.

And why is using student evaluations to determine pay legally problematic? Because there is a mountain of peer-reviewed scientific research proving that student evaluations are heavily systematically biased against women and minorities. Really? Yes. Study after study shows that students consistently rate male professors higher than female professors for the exact same teaching performance. How does that bias actually manifest in the evaluations?

Like, what are the students writing? It manifests through deeply ingrained gender stereotypes. Male professors are frequently praised for being brilliant or authoritative or challenging. If a man is strict, he is respected. And if a woman is strict. If a female professor is strict, she is penalized in her evaluations for being cold, bossy, or unapproachable. Furthermore, students subconsciously expect female professors to perform emotional labor to be nurturing and maternal. That makes so much sense.

Right. When female professors. focus strictly on the academics and don't coddle the students, their scores plummet. Men are never penalized for not being nurturing. So Vassar is using a facially neutral system student reviews that they know is inherently infected with societal gender bias, and they are using that biased data to determine who gets a bonus. Exactly.

Using your earlier analogy, the student evaluations are the weighted vest. Vassar was repeatedly warned by academic experts about the well-documented gender bias in these evaluations. But they kept using them anyway. Instead of adjusting their merit system, they continued to rely on them year after year. They used a biased metric to suppress women's merit scores and consequently to legally launder the suppression of their pay. And it wasn't just the merit scores that were weaponized against these women. The bias also infected the promotion timeline because getting promoted from associate professor to full professor comes as a significant base salary increase. Right. And the data revealed that women were systematically delayed in

their promotions to full professor. How so? The process for women was often grueling. They faced intense scrutiny regarding their publications, their committee work, and their teaching style. They were told to wait to publish one more book, to do one more year of service. Wow, the men. Meanwhile, men with similar or even lesser qualifications seem to glide through the process

easily and were promoted early. And if you delay a woman's promotion by three or four years, you were robbing her of three or four years of that higher full professor-based salary, which again, compounds over the rest of her career. The math is just brutal. It's devastating. But having explained the cold, hard, systemic mechanics of this discrimination, I want to set back for a second. We need to humanize this data because these aren't just abstract statistics floating in the spreadsheet. No, these are real people. Right. These are brilliant, fiercely dedicated scholars who had their careers stunted by the institution they loved. We need to look at the specific women who

put their names on this lawsuit. It takes immense courage to sue your own employer, especially in the tight-knit world of academia, where reputation is, well, it's everything. Let's talk about the five named plaintiffs who led this class action. Let's start with Professor Wendy Graham in the English Department. Okay, Professor Graham is a highly regarded scholar. She has authored multiple well-received books, yet she was subjected to an eight-year delay for her promotion to full professor. Eight years. That is nearly a decade of career stagnation. How does an institution justify holding someone back for eight years? They justify it through extreme moving target scrutiny.

Early in her career, she was told by Vassar leadership that her first book manuscript was unlikely to be published, implying her research wasn't up to standard. It was a massive blow to her confidence. But then what happened with that manuscript? Two months later, that exact same manuscript was accepted without revision by the Stanford University Press. I'm my God. Which is one of the most prestigious academic publishers in the world. That perfectly illustrates the internal gas lighting. Vassar tells her she's not good enough, and Stanford University says, this is brilliant, will print it immediately.

Exactly. And over the course of her eight-year delay, at least 20 men who started at Vassar either at the same time as her or after her were promoted to full professor before she was. It's infuriating. Yeah. Next, we have Professor Maria Hohn in the history department. Her academic record is simply Stellar. Beyond Stellar. She directed a consortium that secured a $2.5 million melon grant for the college. For context, bringing a $2.5 million grant to a liberal arts college is a massive achievement. That funds programs. It pays for resources, and it elevates the prestige of the entire institution. Exactly. And her personal scholarship is internationally

renowned. Her work has been translated globally into German, Korean, and Chinese. And because of this undeniable excellence, she consistently received the highest possible merit rating of distinction. So she beat the rig system, she got the top scores. She did. But to get that distinction, she had to substantially overwhelmingly outperform her male colleagues. The bar was set astronomically higher for her. But she still did it. Right. And here is the real kicker. Even with those top ratings, even with international acclaim and millions in grant money, Vassar's still paid her less than male colleagues who had fewer years of experience and far fewer accolades. It proves that even when women do everything perfectly, even when they jump through every hoop,

the system still finds a way to underpay them. Then there's Professor Mia Mask and the film department. Her story brings in a whole different layer of discrimination. Yes. Professor Mask was actively discouraged by the administration from even applying for promotion to full professor. And the reason they gave her was directly tied to her taking a recent maternity leave. motherhood penalty. Exactly. She was led to believe that taking time off to have a child would harm her chances of passing the review process because she supposedly hadn't produced enough

continuous work. So what did she do? Acting on this advice from her superiors, she delayed her application. Meanwhile, male colleagues with less experience and fewer publications were actively encouraged by leadership to apply, and they were promoted ahead of her. Vassar effectively weaponized her motherhood to suppress her career trajectory. That is just gross. Next is Professor Cindy Schwartz in the physics department. We talked earlier about the bias in student evaluations. Professor Schwartz is where that bias hit a brick wall of institutional censorship. Yeah, Professor Schwartz is a powerhouse. She won a highly prestigious National Award in Physics Education. She secured massive grants from the National Science Foundation. She is exactly the kind of professor at college should be flaunting.

Right. But she consistently struggled to receive a distinction rating in her performance reviews. Because the administration relied heavily on those biased student evaluations to drag her overall scores down, physics is traditionally a male-dominated field, and female physics professors often face the most severe gender bias in student reviews. But she didn't just accept it. She fought back, right? She did. She formally complained about the well-documented gender bias in student evaluations and asked the administration to look into it. And Vassar's response was chilling. What do they do? The administration admitted to her in writing that there was an active ban on researching gender bias in student evaluations at the college. Wait, an academic

institution, a place dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and truth, literally placed a ban on researching a specific topic because the findings might expose their own liability. Exactly that. That is a fundamental betrayal of academic freedom. It shows how far they were willing to go to protect the mechanism of their discrimination. Finally, we have Professor Dabra Zeifman in the psychology department. Her story highlights the severe retaliation women face when they try to fix the broken system. What happened to her? Before she was eligible for a full professor, she observed a female colleague being unfairly treated during the tenure process. So, Professor Zeifman wrote a formal dissenting letter, pushing back against the department and supporting the other woman's

tenure application. She tried to hold the door open for another woman. She used her voice to fight the bias. And the empire struck back. For writing that letter, she was publicly berated in a department meeting by a senior male faculty member. Wow. That man later became her department chair, which means he controlled her evaluations. Following that incident, she was punished with negative reviews, her leadership abilities were suddenly called into question, and her own promotion to full professor was significantly delayed. The message was clear. If you challenge the old boys club, we will stall your career. Very clear.

These five women, Graham, Hoon, Masks, Schwartz, and Ziphon, they put everything on the line, they put their careers, their reputations, they're standing in the academic community on the line to file this federal lawsuit. They do. When you sue your employer, you're usually treated like a pariah. Colleagues distance themselves from you because they don't want to get caught in the blast radius. But here is the massive, unprecedented plot twist in this story. The reaction from their male colleagues was not defined. offensive. It was revolutionary. This is truly one of the most remarkable and legally significant aspects of this entire case. In September of 2023, 29 male full professors at Vassar College wrote a public letter, and they published it in the student newspaper, The Miscellany News. And in this letter, they didn't just offer vague thoughts and prayers. They didn't just say, oh, we hope this gets resolved peacefully. What did they actually write? They explicitly stated they were voicing their strong, unequivocal support for the women's class action lawsuit.

They publicly validated the women's claims, stating the suit was due to longstanding gender-based discrimination in salary at Vassar. Wow, they called it out directly. They did. They called on the president and the board of trustees to immediately settle the case and fully compensate the women for years of lost wages. That is incredible solidarity. But the truly devastating detail for Vassar's legal defense is the specific identity of the men who's signed that letter. Exactly. Of the 29 men who signed the letter, 15 of them were the exact comparators named in the lawsuit. I want everyone listening to truly grasp what a comparator is and why this is so wild. Imagine you are forced to file a paid discrimination lawsuit against

your company. The law requires you to prove that a man is getting paid more than you for the same work. Right. So you have to publicly name the specific male colleagues who make more money than you. You have to list their actual names in a federal court document. It is incredibly awkward and often destroys workplace relationships. Right. You would expect those men to get defensive. You'd expect them to say, hey, don't drag me into this. I earn my money because I work late and I hustle harder than you. That's the usual reaction, yeah. But instead, these 15 men, the very men Vassar was using as the benchmark for high performance right to the newspaper and publicly say the women are right. We are overpaid compared to them. We do not work harder than them. We do not work harder than

them, pay them what they deserve. The cultural and legal significance of this moment cannot be overstated. These male colleagues effectively weaponized their own privilege to dismantle the administration's defense. It's beautiful, honestly. In employment discrimination cases, the employer's standard playbook is almost always to argue that the male comparators simply worked harder or were more qualified or took on more rigorous responsibilities. It's the merit defense we talked about. Yes. But a defense lawyer cannot stand up in federal court and argue that the men worked harder when the men themselves have already published a letter saying, no, we don't. The system is just rigged in our favor. It completely instantly neutralized the

administration's primary defense strategy. It isolated the administration and proved that the faculty, regardless of gender, uniformly recognized the illegitimacy of the college's compensation structure. So with the facts establish, with the internal data leaked, with the male allies literally testifying against their own paychecks in the student paper. How did this actually hold up in a court of law? Because Vassert did not just surrender. No, they didn't. They hired expensive lawyers. They fought this. Let's look at the legal showdown. We have the transcript and the rulings from a critical hearing on September 12, 2024 in front of Judge Kathy Sable in the Southern District of New York. So Vassar's legal strategy was to try and kill the lawsuit in its infancy.

They filed a motion to dismiss. Okay. Specifically, they targeted the plaintiff's claims under the New York Equal Pay Law, or EPL. Vassar's lead lawyer, Camille Olson, stood up in court and argued that the female professors hadn't met the strict pleading standards required to even bring a lawsuit. She heavily lean on a legal standard known as Twombly and Iqbal. Okay, let's pause and translate the jargon. What is a motion to dismiss and what is Quambly and Iqbal? Because Twombly and Iqbal sounds like a 19th century Vodgval Act, but I know it's a massive hurdle in civil litigation.

It really is. A motion to dismiss is basically a defendant telling the judge, hey, even if everything the plaintiff says in their complaint is true, it still doesn't amount to a violation of the law. So throw the case out now before we spend millions of dollars on discovery. Got it. And the Twombly and Iqbal part. Twombly and Iqbal are two landmark Supreme Court cases that set the rules for what a plaintiff has to put in their initial complaint. What is the rule they establish? The rule is plausibility. Before those cases, you could basically just claim they discriminated against me and get into court. After Tomlien-Ikbal, you can't just make broad, sweeping generalizations. You have to provide enough specific factual details in your complaint to state a claim to relief that is plausible on its face.

So you have to show your homework before the trial even starts. And Vassar's lawyer argued that the women hadn't shown enough homework. Exactly. Vassar argued that simply stating they were all full professors wasn't enough. The defense argued the women didn't prove that their actual job content, the day-to-day grind of their specific roles, was exactly the same as the men they were comparing themselves to. So they were trying to split hairs. They were trying to slice the bologna as thin as possible, arguing that a physics professor and an English professor don't do the exact same work, therefore they can't be compared for equal pay. But Judge Seibel didn't buy it.

she denied Vassar's motion to dismiss. And the reasoning she used is exactly why this case is a landmark victory that every employee in New York State needs to understand. Definitely. She highlighted a critical legislative amendment that was made to the New York Labor Law Section 194 back in 2019. This is the turning point of the entire case. This is where the law finally caught up to the reality of the modern workplace. Let's break down the difference of viewing the old law and the new law. Okay.

So under the old federal equal pay act, a plaintiff had to prove that she performed equal work to a man. And over the decades, conservative courts had interpreted the phrase equal work incredibly narrowly. How narrow. You basically had to prove that your job duties were virtually identical to the man's down to the smallest, most insignificant detail. It placed an excessive, almost impossible burden of proof on women. employers could easily point to minor superficial differences in job duties to legally justify massive pay gaps. They could say, well, the male manager oversees the Tuesday inventory and the female manager oversees the Wensi inventory, so the work isn't equal. Exactly.

It allowed employers to hide systemic bias behind technicalities. But in 2019, the New York State Legislature recognized this flaw. They changed the wording of the state law. What do they change it to? They expanded the required standard from proving, equal work to proving substantially similar work. Substantially similar. That is a massive shift in the English language.

Yeah. And it has profound implications in a courtroom. Huge implications. It's like the difference between a detective needing a perfect fingerprint match to place a suspect at the scene of a crime versus just needing the specific composite sketch while holding the stolen goods. That's a great way to put it. The old federal law demanded a perfect fingerprint match. If one ridge was off, the employer won.

The New York law says if it looks like a duck and acts like a duck, it's substantially similar. It strips away the employer's ability to hide behind minor technical differences. That is exactly right. The new standard looks at the work not as a rigid checklist, but as a composite. It asks, does the job require a substantially similar composite of skill, effort, and responsibility performed under similar working conditions? And Judge Seibel pointed to press in to back this up. She did. She cited a recent Second Circuit appellate case.

Eisenhower v. Culinary Institute of America. That case explicitly confirmed that the New York State standard of substantially similar work is definitively broader and more forgiving to plaintiffs than the federal equal work standard. Because all Vassar-tenured professors have the exact same baseline job requirements, teaching five courses a year, supervising theses, participating in committees. They absolutely perform substantially similar work, regardless of whether they teach history or physics. Precisely. Therefore, Judge Seibel ruled that the plaintiffs had easily met the plausibility standard under the New York law.

She completely defeated Vassar's attempt to kill the lawsuit early. Yeah, she slammed the door on their motion to dismiss and forced Vassar to proceed toward full discovery and a potential jury trial. And that is the absolute last thing Vassar wanted. Think about the optics. The threat of a highly public federal trial with 15 elite male professors taking the stand to testify against the college and years of interest. internal gaslighting emails being read aloud by lawyers in open court. It would be a disaster for them. That is a catastrophic PR nightmare for an institution whose entire brand is gender equality.

They would be exposed as complete hypocrites on the front page of the New York Times for weeks. Which is why, following the judge's refusal to dismiss the case, Vassar was forced to face reality. They had no leverage left. And this leads us to the resolution of the case, the historic settlement agreement. Let's dissect this settlement because it is comprehensive, and it provides a roadmap for how these systemic issues can actually be rectified. Let's look at the financial architecture first. The top line number is a gross fund value of $5 million. Vassar is required to place this money into an interest-bearing qualified settlement fund, which is managed by a neutral third-party administrator. Let's clarify the jargon again. What makes a fund a qualified settlement fund, or a QSF, and why does that matter?

A QSF is essentially a temporary, legally protected holding pen for the settlement money. It's a tool authorized by the IRS. Why do they use it? It matters because it allows the defendant Vassar to pay the $5 million right away and immediately claim their tax deduction, effectively washing their hands of the money. But it allows the plaintiff's time to figure out exactly how the money will be divided, and it gives the individual women time to plan for the tax implications before the money hits their personal bank accounts. It's a mechanism for order and fairness.

Okay, so the $5 million sitting in the holding pen, who actually gets this money? The money is distributed to what the court defines as the participating settlement class members. In this specific case, the class is defined as any woman who is employed by Vassar College as a full professor at any point between May 14, 2015, and the date the court preliminarily approves the settlement. Now, they aren't just taking the $5 million, dividing it by the number of eligible women and writing everyone identifiable. checks, right? No, that wouldn't be fair because a woman who became a full professor in 2022 suffered far less financial damage than a woman who had been a full professor since 2015. That makes sense. So the distribution is proportional. It is meticulously calculated based on the duration of their employment at Vassar and their specific time spent in the class period. The longer a woman suffered

under the college's suppressed wages, the larger her proportional share of the settlement fund. And then comes the taxman. How is this money treated? by the IRS, because receiving a massive check from a lawsuit isn't like winning the lottery. It's categorized very specifically. The taxation structure of these settlements is a major point of negotiation. In this agreement, the payouts are split. One third of each woman's payment is legally classified as wages. This represents the actual back pay they should have earned.

Because it's classified as wages, it is reported on a standard W-2 form, and it is subject to all normal payroll taxes, Medicare, Social Security. in income tax withholdings. And what about the other two-thirds? The remaining two-thirds of the payment is classified as non-wage income, specifically representing damages for emotional distress and other non-economic harms caused by the discrimination. So how is that taxed? This portion is reported on a 1099 form.

It is not subject to payroll taxes, though the women will still have to pay standard income tax on it when they file their returns. It's a way to maximize the benefit to the plaintiffs while satisfying the IRS rules on what constitutes a wage. What about the five women who actually stuck their necks out to lead the lawsuit? Do they get anything extra for the risk they took? Yes, and deservedly so.

The court approved service awards of $75,000 for each of the five named plaintiffs professors Graham, Hoon, Mask, Schwartz, and Zeifman. This money comes out of the gross fund before the rest is distributed. Why do courts allow service awards? Because being a named plaintiff in a federal class action is a brutal, exhausting second job. It requires a massive professional risk. They face potential retaliation. They spend hundreds of hours gathering data, reviewing documents, and sitting for grueling depositions by hostile defense attorneys.

Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare. The $75,000 is a recognition of the labor they performed on behalf of the entire class of women who didn't have to endure depositions. And, of course, lawyers get paid. Up to one third of the gross fund is allocated for attorney's fees and costs for the firms that fought this battle leave Cabreraeim and Bernstein and eco-rights advocates. Very standard. Now, I have a logistical question. What happens if there is money left over in the QSF?

Let's say some eligible women have moved away, or they pass away and their checks never get cashed. Does the leftover money go back into Vassar's pockets? Absolutely not. That is a crucial safeguard in these agreements. Any un-cashed or leftover funds are subject to what is called a C-Press distribution. C-PRE. What does that translate to? It's legal doctrine derived from French, meaning as near as possible. It means that if you can't give the settlement money to the direct victims,

you must give it to a charity or organization whose mission aligns as closely as possible with the original purpose of the lawsuit. So it prevents the wrongdoer from accidentally profiting from uncash checks. Where does the C.Pres money go in this case? It will be split equally between two highly relevant organizations. Legal momentum, which is the nation's oldest legal defense funds, advancing the rights of women in the workplace, and hers, the Higher Education Resource Services Network, which is dedicated to creating and sustaining women's leadership in higher education.

That is poetic justice. If Vassar can't pay the women they wronged, their money goes to train the next generation of women to hold institutions like Vassar accountable. Exactly. There is one more legal mechanic in the settlement document I want to ask about. There is a specific clause that states if more than 5% of the eligible, class members decide to opt out of the settlement, Vassar has the unilateral right to completely rescind the agreement and walk away. Why do employers demand these right to rescind clauses? It sounds like they are holding the deal hostage. It's purely about finality and risk management. When Vassar

agrees to hand over $5 million, they're essentially buying global peace regarding these specific equal pay claims. They are paying to ensure the problem goes away entirely. Okay, but then why the opt-out part? Because in a class action, individual members always have the right to opt-out if they think the settlement is unfair, which allows them to retain their right to sue the employer individually. I see. Vassar does not want to pay $5 million to settle the class action, only to turn around the next day and face 10 new, separate individual lawsuits from women who opted out and want more money. That would defeat the purpose of settling. Yes. The 5% threshold is an insurance policy. It ensures that the vast, overwhelming majority of potential claims are extinguished

by the single agreement. If too many women opt out, the global peace is broken, and Vassar can withdraw their money and take their chances at trial. They are buying closure. It makes total sense from a corporate defense standpoint. But as much as we focus on the math, the taxes, and the $5 million, I genuinely believe that the most important part of this settlement is not the cash. It's what the legal documents refer to as the programmatic relief. I agree completely. The cash payment fixes the sins of the past, but the programmatic relief is the structural engineering designed to fix the future. And Vassar is now legally bound to implement massive changes. Let's talk about those changes.

Yeah. Because they strike right at the heart of the secrecy that allowed this gap to grow for 20 years. Right. For a mandatory period of three years, Vassar must surrender its internal oversight. They are legally required to hire an independent third-party consultant. They are currently using a respected firm called Charles River Associates to conduct rigorous annual pay equity audits. And Vassar can't just ignore the results of those audits like they ignored the 2011 survey, right? Correct. The settlement mandates that Vassar must make appropriate systemic salary adjustments based on whatever disparities the third-party auditors find. Furthermore, they lose the ability to hide behind administrative secrecy.

They are now required to make the exact methods, metrics, and criteria for compensation and promotion fully available and transparent to the faculty compensation committee and to all full professors. Yes, that's huge. They have to explain exactly how performance is being evaluated, how merit points are awarded, and exactly how those points translate into dollars. Vassar has permanently lost its ability to hoard the raw data. They can no longer look, a world-class female economist in the eye, tell her the data is top. top secret and then hand it over to a male colleague. Forced transparency is the ultimate proven antidote to systemic bias. And to ensure they don't backslide, FASER has to provide an annual compliance report to the plaintiff's legal counsel, summarizing the results of these third-party audits and

detailing any policy changes. The federal court retains active jurisdiction over the college for three full years to ensure they comply with every single letter of this agreement. It is a total loss of institutional control over their own payroll darkness. They are being forced to operate in the light. So bringing this all back to the reason Mark Carey built this discussion, this case is a massive flashing warning sign for every employee and every employer in America. It proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the ivory tower is not immune to the mundane, ugly realities of illegal gender bias. Not immune at all. If this kind of systemic, deeply entrenched discrimination can happen and thrive at Vassar College,

An institution literally built on the foundational mission of women's equality, an institution that actively markets itself as a champion of progressive liberal values. Then it is happening everywhere. We desperately want to believe that good intentions, a liberal arts pedigree, or, you know, a progressive mission statement, act as a shield against systemic failures. But the data doesn't care about your founding myth. It really doesn't. The math doesn't care about your PR.

The data only shows who is getting paid and who is getting paid. and who is getting left behind. Exactly. The progressive brand was actually a cloak that allowed the discrimination to hide in plain sight. It took five incredibly brave women willing to risk their life's work

backed by the unprecedented solidarity of their male colleagues and a crucial modernization in New York State law to finally force the truth into the light. It's a monumental achievement. It is. Which leaves us with a lingering, slightly unsettling question

for you to mull over as you look at your own workplace. The programmatic relief in this settlement, the forced transparency, the independent third-party audits, the mandatory salary adjustments overseen by a federal judge, it only lasts for three years. Yeah, it is legally mandated, heavily supervised 36-month window of equity. Right. So the real question is, what happens on day one of year four? When the judge's order expires and the third-party auditors pack up and go home, does an institution's underlying culture permanently change because of 30-year-old? six months of forced compliance. It's the multi-million dollar question. Or does the arc of the academic universe and the corporate universe naturally bend back towards secrecy, back toward the

comfort of the old boys network, and back toward the easy path of disparate impact? We'll have to see. It's a challenge to consider whether true, lasting equity can ever genuinely rely on the goodwill and mission statements of an institution, or if it permanently requires the threat of the law and the sharp unforgiving glare of an independent audit. Thank you for listening, and we'll catch you next time. If you like the Employees Survival Guide, I'd really encourage you to leave a review. We try really hard to produce information to you that's informative, that's timely that you can actually use and solve problems on your own and at your employment. So if you like to leave a review anywhere you listen to our podcast, please do so. And leave five stars because anything less than five

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