A Bangor woman will receive nearly $181,000 after Northern Light paid her less than her male counterparts.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston issued a decision Friday, saying the hospital violated Maine’s equal pay law by paying psychologist Dr. Clare Mundell less than her male psychologist colleagues. Mundell will receive $180,955, which is backpay multiplied by three.
“It’s everything we wanted,” Mundell’s attorney David Webbert said. “Dr. Mundell really wanted to create a precedent that would help other women that were getting unfairly underpaid.”
Mundell started working at Acadia Hospital in November 2017 as a psychologist for $50 per hour. She learned about two years later that her male psychologist colleagues were making $90 and $95 an hour, while they were doing the same job.
She sued Northern Light Health in January 2021 in federal court. U.S. District Judge Lance Walker found the hospital violated Maine’s equal pay law. Northern Light appealed the decision to the federal appeals court, which found in Mundell’s favor, 2-1.
Northern Light is evaluating the decision and has no comment, spokesperson Suzanne Spruce said.
Both sides agreed the hospital did pay female psychologists less than males, but Northern Light said that difference was not because of gender, seniority or time of shifts, but instead it was because of “market-based compensation structure,” per the opinion.
If an employer pays unequal wages male and female employees who do comparable work in similar jobs, that employer is committing impermissible discrimination, regardless of intent, the appeals court said.
Chief Judge David Barron dissented, in part because he thought the appeals court should be wary of predicting how the Maine Supreme Judicial Court would interpret Maine’s Equal Pay Law.
Around the same time of Mundell learning about the discrepancy, the hospital learned of other sex-based pay disparities and started to standardize pay, the appeals decision said. Mundell and the hospital had those conversations, but she submitted her two-week resignation because of the pay differences between herself and her male counterparts.
The next business day after her resignation, the hospital told her she did not need to work those last two weeks and to not return.
Webbert said he hopes this decision is a wake up call for Northern Light and other businesses that try to pay women less.
“It’s bad for business to discriminate against talented women, and they need to get that in their heads,” Webbert said. “I don’t want to work somewhere where the women are treated as second class citizens. I’m not going to work there. You’re driving away a lot of the talent pool if you come across by being backward in your views of equal opportunity.”
