Under the terms of the settlement, which is pending court approval, a $5 million settlement fund will be set up to compensate approximately 84 full professors for the alleged discrimination, according to Equal Rights Advocates and the law firm Lieff Cabraser Heimann & Bernstein, which represented the plaintiffs.
“This step reflects years of efforts by women faculty members at Vassar, first privately and then in court, to get Vassar to eliminate a gender-based pay gap of which the college has long been aware,” said Catherine Bendor, director of litigation at Equal Rights Advocates and co-counsel for the plaintiffs.
“Our clients worked hard to achieve justice not only for themselves and their colleagues, but for all future women professors,” Bendor continued.
The settlement also calls for Vassar to be more transparent about decisions regarding pay, evaluation and promotion over the next three years, the plaintiffs’ lawyers said. Specifically, the college must hire a third-party consultant to conduct annual “pay audits” of full professor compensation, provide the results to a faculty compensation committee and make pay adjustments based on the results.
Sharon Davidson Chang, chair of the board of trustees at Vassar, said in a statement Friday that if the annual pay audits suggest that further review is warranted, “it will be undertaken promptly.”
Five current and former women full professors – Wendy Graham, Maria Höhn, Mia Mask, Cindy Schwarz, and Debra Zeifman – filed the class action lawsuit against Vassar in August 2023.
Their lawyers said the suit alleged that Vassar had “known for years of a gender pay gap among its full professors and had not adequately addressed it,” which they argued violated Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and New York State laws regarding human rights and equal pay.
Gender disparities in faculty pay have long beset higher education. As The EDU Ledger reported in June, the American Association of University Professors found that women faculty earned an average of $108,678, compared with $130,064 for men – or 83.6 percent of men’s salaries
The largest gender disparity took place at the full professor level, with women full professors earning an average of $150,245, compared with $172,101 for men, a salary-equity ratio of 87.3, the AAUP report found.
Bendor, one of the lawyers for the Vassar women full professors, said she hopes the settlement terms will result in Vassar “appropriately recognizing the contributions of all of its women faculty.”
