5 - Paternalism and Politics in a University Pay System: Christensen v. State of Iowa

Summary

We begin with the beginning. In 1974 representatives of female clerical workers at the University of Northern Iowa filed suit claiming that they were the victims of pay discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The university paid predominantly male physical plant workers higher wages, even though many male and female jobs had been assigned identical pay grades based on the results of an internal job evaluation study. After the plaintiffs lost at the trial level, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals rejected their appeal.

Appellants have failed to demonstrate that the difference in wages paid to clerical and plant employees rested upon sex discrimination and not some other legitimate reason. The evidence shows that UNI paid higher wages to plant workers because wages for similar jobs in the local labor market were higher than the wages established under the Hayes System…. We find nothing in the text and history of Title VII suggesting that Congress intended to abrogate the laws of supply and demand or other economic principles that determine wage rates for various kinds of work. We do not interpret Title VII as requiring an employer to ignore the market in setting wage rates for genuinely different work classifications.

(Christensen v. State of Iowa, 563 F.2d 353 at 355–56 [8th cir. 1977])

Before the term became fashionable, Christensen was the first case to present “comparable worth” as a theory of wage discrimination under Title VII.