California’s Equal Pay Act is intended to make “it illegal for workers to be paid less for substantially similar work based on their gender.” As a result, a judge has now allowed as many as 9,000 women to sue Disney for pay disparity.
As shared in a statement by the plaintiffs’ attorney, Lori Andrus, via Variety, she is quite happy with the outcome. According to her, while the women love being part of Disney, they do want to be paid the same as the men at the company.
“Disney has been gaslighting these women for four years,” she begins in her statement. “They love their jobs. They love the brand. But they want to be respected and treated the way they should be in the workplace.”
Disney has released a statement in response to the ruling. The House of Mouse claims to be disappointed with the decision.
“We are disappointed with the court’s ruling as to the Equal Pay Act claims and are considering our options,” a spokesperson for Disney shared. These thoughts seem to be echoed by Disney’s attorney, Felicia Davis, who Variety notes “argued that the plaintiffs are seeking to compare salaries across thousands of job groups, which reflect the decentralized decisions of thousands of managers.”
The publication notes that the 9,000 women includes the following employees:
“The class includes female Disney employees who have worked for the company in California since April 1, 2015, in a non-union position below the level of vice president, and who have been assigned to a job family and level. It covers employees from the Disneyland hotels and theme park, the cruise line, the Disney film and TV studios, ABC, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and other units. It does not include Pixar, ESPN, Hulu, Fox, or FX.”
Given the variety of work, Davis claims “that Disney will have to put on a massively complex defense at trial in order to show that any disparities were the result of allowable factors, such as education, training and experience.”
Judge Elihu M. Berle gave the following response:
“I know – it’s going to be horrendous,” he begins with a lightly mocking tone. “You’re telling me Disney has no system of categorizing pay grade levels?”
Now that the judge has allowed these 9,000 women to sue Disney, “a status conference is set for Feb. 9.” Additionally, “the trial is expected to be held sometime before October,” according to Andrus. Stay tuned to ScreenGeek for any additional updates as we have them.