Vassar College’s Unequal Gender Pay Lawsuit

Vassar College welcoming the incoming class at the end of Aug. Credit: Buck Lewis via Flickr

On Aug. 30, 2023 Vassar College got hit with a lawsuit from five female professors, Wendy Graham, Maria Höhn, Mia Mask, Cindy Schwarz and Debra Zeifman, alleging unequal pay based on gender.

The suit alleges that for the past two decades, female professors have been paid less than male professors. According to the suit, Vassar is violating labor laws, including the New York State Equal Pay Law and the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Vassar College was founded in 1861 “to provide women an education equal to that once available only to men,” as noted in the suit. The institution even became part of the Seven Sister schools in 1926 with an end goal of providing an Ivy League education, due to women being barred from actual Ivy Leagues.

“Vassar still proudly identifies as a ‘pioneer for women’s education,’ and asserts that the 'unique traditions upon which the college was founded continue to be upheld today,’ including ‘a commitment to the advancement of equality between the sexes,’” the lawsuit clams.

The New York Times pulled data from the Chronicle of Higher Education, finding that the 2003-2004 academic year female professors were being paid 7% less than their male counterparts.

In the 2021-2022 reports it showed that “...male full professors earned $153,238 on average — about 10 percent, or $13,900, more than women of the same academic rank.”

On page two, the lawsuit notes that in 2008, female professors started to bring to light their concerns regarding the unequal pay within the ranks at the college. Vassar allegedly responded to this by decreasing the transparency regarding faculty salaries, essentially to mask their ongoing pattern of underpaying women.

Meanwhile, just over 50% of the faculty at the college are women.

Kelly Dermody, one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs, commented to The Guardian that the female professors “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.”

Elizabeth H. Bradley, president of Vassar College, released statements regarding the lawsuit. In her most recent comment, Bradley expressed how the college will stay committed to resolving these issues in various ways, including having their “Faculty Compensation Committee participate in selecting a third-party compensation analysis firm to use our data and assess pay equity relative to our salary policies and practices.”

Current students of the institution have already shown their support by rallying for an on campus protest on Sept. 13. Vassar College seniors Solaar KirkDacker, the organizer of the student-led group HearUsOut, and Gwynne Smith helped organize the student-led protests.

In addition to the student-led protest, dozens of the faculty wore white to show their solidarity towards the plaintiffs on the day of the protest.

Weeks later, HearUsOut handed out informative pamphlets about the lawsuit to visitors during Families Weekend.

Jacque Abou-Rizk, the Editor-in-Chief of The Miscellany News at Vassar College, was at the scene of the protest to report on it.

“As a reporter, it was just amazing to be able to go up to people and really ask why they're here and hear such emotional responses,” said Abou-Rizk. “We were founded on the basis of […] gender equality in education. And so a lot of students have just felt like they've been lied to.”

Along with help from his fellow writers and editors, he’s been taking the lead on covering stories related to this lawsuit. With previous experience of reporting on a lawsuit in his high school days and being passionate about this issue, Abou-Rizk was ready to take on this task.

In the wake of the lawsuit becoming public, he shared how difficult it was to track down information regarding this lawsuit. It didn’t help that the college was keeping quiet on the matter. As the days rolled by, so did the build up of the information and input from those on campus.

“Our opinion section has also been blowing up. We've gotten a lot of not only letters to the editor, where we have groups of professors […] everyone's writing letters, even the administration wrote a few letters to the editor to us. So our opinions section has been phenomenal,” said Abou-Rizk.

Many of the students, including Abou-Rizk, have been asking the same thing: How could this happen to Vassar College, an institution founded with the aim to uplift women?

“Everywhere, in every industry across the country, women are getting paid less than men. It's just very systemic. And we're just slowly realizing how systemic and how ingrained it is in our very own college,” said Abou-Rizk.

Article was updated with comments from Elizabeth H. Bradley on Oct. 21.