Full disclosure: I know and work with many of the people on both sides of this lawsuit, and while I will try to keep my opinions to a minimum, I doubt I’ll be completely successful.
Jack Moran of the RG has the story on the lawsuit by Psychology professor Jennifer Freyd against UO, alleging gender discrimination in pay:
Psychology professor sues University of Oregon, says she’s paid ‘substantially less’ than male colleagues
The University of Oregon is being sued by a longtime psychology professor who alleges that she’s being paid substantially less than several less-experienced male colleagues, in violation of the federal Equal Pay Act.
Jennifer Freyd’s suit, filed Tuesday morning in U.S. District Court in Eugene, also includes claims alleging disparate treatment and impact, sex-based discrimination under the Equal Protection Clause and Title IX violations.
“For years, I have tried to work within my department and the college to help the UO live up to its own policies of non-discrimination,” Freyd said in a statement issued by her attorneys. “Women all over the country and in all kinds of jobs earn less than their male counterparts. It’s past time for the UO to recognize and address this problem in its own salary practices.”
The suit asserts that professor salaries in the psychology department are supposed to be determined by seniority and merit, and alleges that UO officials are aware of pay differences between their male and female psychology professors.
University spokesman Tobin Klinger said UO officials are aware of Freyd’s allegation and plan to “look closely at the case in the coming days.”
“Although professor Freyd’s pay places her in the top 13 percent of all tenure track faculty at the UO, we are committed to paying our faculty commensurate with their achievements,” Klinger said.
Freyd’s current salary is $155,237 and she receives benefits totaling another $70,545, bringing her total compensation to $225,782, according to data provided by Klinger. …
Oh no, Mr. Klinger. A university that is currently paying its football coach $3.6M a year, its former football coach another $3.6M, ~$400K a pop to assistant coaches both drunk and sober, and which has a very well paid President, Provost, and Deans, etc., should probably avoid bringing up the fact that one of its most internationally known professors, in the midst of a long and very successful career of teaching and research at what is probably UO’s top ranked research department, with an admirable record of attracting top graduate students and placing them well, is paid only $155K. This is not going to help the new Knight Campus recruit top faculty of either gender.
Perhaps Mr. Klinger is just following orders from higher-up, to try and poison the potential jury pool against Freyd by pandering to our state’s anti-education sentiments. Which makes me wonder just how high a price our administration is willing to pay – or should I say make our university pay – to try and win this. So let’s hope that this attack is just Klinger going off the farm.
The RG story goes on to note that Prof. Freyd has gone through many careful steps to demonstrate gender discrimination in her department and try and resolve this without a lawsuit. Her department head (a man, if that matters) has documented this discrimination with a regression that shows that psychology’s female full professors are paid an average of $22K less than males, when accounting for the sort of standard research productivity measure that our administration favors (the H-Index):

Yes it’s a small n, but it’s run on the entire relevant population, not a sample.
The department head’s full letter to the dean’s office is here. He goes on to explain the systematic reasons that gender differences in lives and careers mean that female professors are less likely to pursue outside offers and get retention raises from UO, and that UO has not implemented procedures to address the gender wage gap that can result. He asks the administration to therefore give Freyd the appropriate raise, or at least a fraction of it.
Apparently that request was ignored or rejected. The RG:
Meanwhile, the psychology department completed its own study during the spring of 2016 that addressed a range of topics and found male professors are paid an average of about $25,000 more per year than their female counterparts, according to the suit. That study was provided to deans in the UO’s College of Arts & Sciences.
The UO then appointed a committee to evaluate the psychology department. A report from the group noted gender pay disparities and recommended the department should continue “pressing for gender equity in terms of pay at the senior levels of the faculty,” the lawsuit says.
Ulrich Mayr, the psychology department’s head, emailed the College of Arts & Sciences’ deans in December requesting they address Freyd’s salary, which he characterized as “our most glaring inequity case,” according to the suit. Mayr asserted Freyd’s pay is as much as $50,000 below where it should be, the lawsuit says.
The College of Arts & Sciences announced raises in January. Freyd earned standard pay increases but no additional raise based on requests that she and Mayr had made, according to the suit.
Andrew Marcus, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences, and Hal Sadofsky, the associate dean, met with Freyd on Jan. 18. They told her that they would not address sex discrimination in her pay, and “belittled her comments” by saying that only three men in her department earned more than her, the lawsuit says.
There are those who will argue that this gender gap is simply the competitive market at work. Those people must have failed undergraduate microeconomics. Eugene’s labor market for research active PhD’s is not a competitive market. It’s a local monopsony in which the employer, UO, exercises considerable market power. We covered this in week 8, but if you skipped that lecture check the textbook for the implications for wage discrimination.
Other links: Professor Freyd’s law firm is the well known Johnson, Johnson, Lucas and Middleton of Eugene. They’ve posted the following:
Press Release http://justicelawyers.com/distinguished-uo-professor-files-suit-alleging-discriminatory-pay-practices/
Complaint: http://justicelawyers.com/wp-content/uploads/001-0-170321-COMPLAINT.pdf
Timeline of events showing the efforts by Professor Freyd since 2014 to address the gender gap, without having to take UO to court. http://justicelawyers.com/wp-content/uploads/FINAL-Timeline-UO-Freyd-Discrimination.pdf
Oregonian report: UO psychology professor accuses school of pay discrimination
Klinger repeats his ill-advised comments.