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What makes jobs too dissimilar to compare in a pay equity analysis?

Strah et al. (2021) did a nice job of discussing the case law related to the similarity of two jobs as well as discussing how job analysis methods can be used to compare the similarity of two or more jobs. As demonstrated by Strah et al., most of the Equal Pay Act (EPA) and Title VII litigation regarding employee pay is a battle between the plaintiff’s claim that two jobs are substantially equal or substantially similar and the defendant’s claim that two jobs are different enough that they are not substantially equal or similar. The standard used by most courts for substantially equal or similar is narrow (Sady & Aamodt, 2016). For example, in Finke v. Trustees of Purdue University (2014), deans in different schools were not considered to be substantially similar; in Jacobs v. College of William and Mary (1980), athletic coaches were not considered to be substantially equal; and in Spaulding v. University of Washington (1984), faculty in different schools were not considered to be substantially equal. In audits conducted by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP), however, it is our experience that the battle in these audits is quite different than in litigation. To create pay analysis groups large enough for regression analysis, OFCCP often combines jobs that are not substantially similar and, based on the reviews of Strah et al. (2021) and Sady and Aamodt (2016), would not be considered substantially similar by the court if the case went to litigation. In OFCCP audits, there are three main sources of disagreement between the OFCCP and the federal contractor regarding job similarity and sex or race/ethnicity differences in compensation: