AstraZeneca is yet to put allegations of unequal pay behind it. Almost three years after AstraZeneca settled claims it underpaid female sales reps, a court has cleared three women to continue trying to build a case against the company.
The U.S. Department of Labor previously alleged that AstraZeneca undercompensated female employees in certain roles. AstraZeneca reached a deal to resolve the case in 2021, vowing to set up a $560,000 fund to compensate employees who suffered discrimination and immediately eliminate practices that negatively affected the compensation of female salespersons.
Now, three women who worked at AstraZeneca from around 2000 to 2020 have taken an early step in a legal challenge against the drugmaker. The court allowed the plaintiffs to send notices to females employed by AstraZeneca in sales positions as of Dec. 30, 2018, the first step in a potential collective action. But the bar for granting that permission is low, with the judge unable to weigh evidence or determine credibility at this stage.
“Frankly, Plaintiffs’ declarations do not say much, primarily regurgitating allegations contained in their already thin amended complaint. But another word for ‘allegations lifted from a complaint and repeated verbatim in a declaration’ is ‘evidence,’ and arguably weak evidence is still evidence that the Court ... may not weigh at this stage,” the judge wrote.
The judge said Nancy Ledinsky’s declaration provides the most weight because “she at least recounts a specific instance” of potential pay discrimination. According to Ledinsky, her manager said in 2017 that AstraZeneca was paying her “significantly less than male sales representatives in the same or similar position.” Ledinsky was later promoted to but found her pay would be that of a Level 3 staffer.
“Ledinsky states that this surprised her because a requirement for her new role was experience at the Level 4 rank, and because she knew a male sales representative had recently received a promotion to the Oncology Sales Representative role but was not demoted to Level 3,” the judge wrote. AstraZeneca reinstated her Level 4 status but kept her pay at Level 3, according to the allegations.
The court concluded that, when read together, the plaintiffs’ declarations and other information present evidence that AstraZeneca “has committed gender-based pay discrimination in different sales specialties and at different levels of the career ladder, and inflicted such discrimination upon plaintiffs.” If the case proceeds, that evidence will face a tougher examination to determine if AstraZeneca has erred or not.