McGuireWoods London managing partner Dan Peyton was quoted in a Jan. 10, 2020, article in Personnel Today on an equal pay case in which a journalist won her claim against the BBC, having proven that she did the same work as a male co-worker who was paid six times more than she was.
In the article, Peyton — a labor and employment partner — advised that employers “need to be very careful about how they seek to differentiate roles where there are arguments about equal pay issues.”
“Although gender pay gap reporting obligations are not directly concerned with issues of equal pay, what has become clear is that a significant proportion of the pay differential in the workplace results from factors that include men and women being disproportionately represented in higher and lower paying roles,” he told the publication.
Recognizing the precedent that this case sets in the UK, Peyton said, “The relevance of this to the equal pay issue is that there will now be even greater scrutiny as to whether the categorization, and compensation, of employees due to differences in roles are genuine and justified.”