A group of professors at Vassar, the historic US women’s college in New York, tried for years to internally resolve an issue of being paid less than their male counterparts but now they have finally resorted to legal action, a lawyer for the group said.
Vassar has been hit with a federal lawsuit brought by five senior female professors who allege their employer has “knowingly” and “systematically” been paying them and other female professors less than the men for nearly 20 years.
Plaintiffs Wendy Graham, Maria Höhn, Mia Mask, Cindy Schwarz and Debra Zeifman work across the arts and sciences and are described by their attorneys as “leaders in their fields, highly regarded by both their contemporaries and their students”.
Kelly Dermody, an attorney representing the professors, said the decision to sue Vassar was a long time coming.
They “tried for more than a decade to resolve these issues privately and quietly. They finally accepted, reluctantly, that the college would not address their concerns without litigation,” Dermody said.
The lawsuit claims the college is violating several labor and human rights laws, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the New York State Equal Pay Law.
“Despite publicly claiming a storied role in the movement for gender equality, Vassar has long and privately been underpaying its female professors,” the suit says.
Vassar is a private liberal arts college in Poughkeepsie, New York, part of the famous Seven Sisters group of Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Radcliffe and Wellesley, established in 1927 to offer women an education comparable to the Ivy League elites they were then barred from. Vassar was the first in the group to became co-ed, in 1969 after declining an invitation to merge with Yale, and women today make up 55% of the student body and just over 50% of the faculty.
Unlike public colleges and universities in the US, private institutions are not required to disclose salary information of staff and faculty, a practice with which the plaintiffs also take issue.
The lawsuit says: “Since at least as early as 2008, and consistently since then, female professors have internally elevated concerns to the Vassar administration about unequal pay within the college’s ranks. Instead of remedying its gender pay gap, Vassar responded by decreasing the level of transparency about faculty salaries, in an apparent attempt to mask its decades-long pattern of underpaying of women.”
Dermody said the professors have found airing pay issues publicly very painful.
“The plaintiffs have spent most of their careers – and in some cases most of their lives – helping to build Vassar into the great institution it is today,” Dermody said.Vassar maintains that its academics are paid fairly.
The college sent a statement from the president, Elizabeth Bradley, that said, in part: “It’s critical to understand that we have a shared governance approach at Vassar which includes the president, board, students, and faculty. Faculty performance at Vassar is peer-reviewed and faculty-led … [salary] differences are generally correlated to factors such as discipline (some disciplines command more in the faculty market), years in their positions, and peer evaluations.”
It added that: “The difference between the average salary of men and women is fully explained by these factors.”
The statement indicated Vassar was open to third party review and said: “We are committed to pay equity.”
At one point, Vassar did publicly share salary information for full professors, from 2003 to 2022, with the Chronicle of Higher Education outlet.
It revealed that male professors were paid more on average than female professors each year.
The plaintiffs also argue that not only has Vassar been underpaying its female full professors for years, but that wage gap has widened.
A Vassar spokesperson shared a further statement with the Guardian indicating that the college shares “de-identified” salary data with an internal faculty committee.
“Individual identifiers – gender, department, etc – are removed and shared with that committee, which is charged with recommending salary increases each year,” the statement said.
It added: “Information about the details of faculty salary increases is shared with the full faculty every year … and we share salary information on faculty salary ranges for each of the professorial ranks,” also noting that “we share data in a way that is consistent with our peer institutions”.
Ariane Hegewisch, a senior research fellow at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said that, nationally, academia has more female professionals than male but a wage gap persists.
“Typically in professional fields the gap is more than, say, in the lower-wage fields because there’s higher pay [overall],” Hegewisch said.
Hegewisch said likely reasons female Vassar professors are relatively lower paid are “an undervaluation of women’s work. The fields where more women work – such as English – tend to have lower salaries than those where more men work – such as economics,” as well as discrimination against women that carries over from previously-held jobs.
She added that, typically: “Your starting salary in a new job is calculated based on your past job so you get less in absolute terms than a man who comes in with a higher salary.”
Hannah Nice, a Vassar alumnus from the class of 2018, called the situation at her alma mater “disheartening”.
“I did recognize a number of the names [of professors] that were listed. We took courses from them for a number of years. With Vassar being founded as an all female college, it just sort of feels hypocritical in a way, with all the values that have been instilled in school for such a long time.”
She added: “I love Vassar, and I’m so happy I went there. I thought all of my professors were outstanding, and the majority of those professors were female. I’m really proud of these professors for being willing to speak out. I have no clue if it’s going to have any ramifications for their positions or how other people view them. Hopefully, not only will this create changes at Vassar, but also at other institutions across the states.”
