Gender Discrimination

Title VII prohibits discrimination based on sex in all aspects of employment for employers with 15 or more employees. The prohibition covers hiring, firing, pay, promotions, job assignments, training, benefits, and every other term and condition of employment. Title VII's protections extend to discrimination based on sex stereotyping — adverse treatment based on an employee's failure to conform to gender expectations about appearance, behavior, or roles. The Supreme Court has also confirmed that Title VII's prohibition on sex discrimination encompasses discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The federal Equal Pay Act of 1963 requires employers to pay men and women equal wages for substantially equal work performed under similar working conditions. Unlike Title VII, the EPA does not require filing a charge with the EEOC before bringing a lawsuit, and it applies to virtually all employers (not just those with 15 or more employees). Under the EPA, the employee must show that the employer pays employees of the opposite sex differently for work requiring substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility. The employer can defend an EPA claim only by showing that the pay difference is based on a seniority system, a merit system, a system that measures earnings by quantity or quality of production, or a differential based on any factor other than sex.

West Virginia enacted the Equal Pay and Opportunities Act to strengthen equal pay protections beyond what federal law provides. This legislation addresses several gaps in the federal EPA framework. The Act prohibits employers from asking job applicants about their salary history — a practice that can perpetuate gender-based pay disparities from job to job. It also prohibits employers from retaliating against employees who discuss their wages with coworkers, recognizing that pay transparency is essential to identifying and correcting pay discrimination. These provisions represent a significant advancement in equal pay enforcement, because salary history bans help break the cycle of underpayment that follows women from one employer to the next, and pay transparency protections empower employees to identify disparities and assert their rights.

When qualified women are consistently passed over for promotions in favor of less qualified men, the pattern constitutes gender discrimination. The "glass ceiling" can manifest through subjective promotion criteria that favor traditionally masculine traits, exclusion from informal networks, mentoring relationships, and high-visibility assignments that lead to advancement, stereotypical assumptions that women are less committed to their careers because of family responsibilities, and requiring women to demonstrate higher qualifications than men to receive the same opportunities. Evidence of a pattern — showing that women in the organization are concentrated in lower-level positions despite comparable qualifications — can support both individual and systemic discrimination claims.

Pregnancy discrimination is a form of gender discrimination, and our dedicated pregnancy discrimination page addresses the specific legal protections available. Beyond pregnancy itself, caregiving discrimination — adverse treatment based on an employee's caregiving responsibilities for children, elderly parents, or other family members — disproportionately affects women and can constitute gender discrimination when the employer applies different standards to men and women with similar caregiving obligations.