Chauniqua Young is a respected employment lawyer and partner at Outten & Golden LLP who has dedicated her legal career to protecting employee rights and advancing workplace equality. Following law school, Chauniqua Young joined the Center for Constitutional Rights as a Bertha Fellow, litigating landmark civil rights cases before joining Outten & Golden LLP as an associate in 2014 and becoming a partner in 2021. Through high-profile litigation, public speaking, and legal advocacy, Chauniqua Young has earned national recognition as a trusted voice on employment law, fair pay, workplace discrimination, and civil rights, and has been named among The Best Lawyers in America for 2026. Her work centers on protecting employees facing workplace discrimination, retaliation, and wage violations, including disputes over Why Equal Pay Claims Do Not Only Compare Job Titles, the subject explored in the article below.
An employee may learn that a coworker with the same title earns more and wonder whether that difference is fair or lawful. A pay gap can raise a real concern, but it does not resolve the legal issue by itself. When the concern is an Equal Pay Act equal-work question, the comparison first asks whether the higher-paid and lower-paid workers perform substantially equal work.
The federal Equal Pay Act addresses sex-based wage differences between employees of different sexes in the same establishment. Its equal-work comparison looks at jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility under similar working conditions. The jobs do not have to match in every detail. They must be substantially equal under that structure.
Job titles can be too broad to show what employees actually do. A title may group jobs that differ in daily requirements, while different labels may describe work that is equal under the federal Equal Pay Act factors. That is why the comparison turns on actual job requirements and performance rather than the name of the position.
Actual duties show how the job operates in practice. A comparison may examine whether workers perform the same significant tasks and whether different tasks change the level of skill, effort, or responsibility required. Added duties matter when they truly exist, are more than minimal or peripheral, and help explain the higher pay.
Skill can make two similar-looking jobs different. Skill means the experience, training, education, and ability required to perform the job. The focus stays on the skill the job requires. A qualification a worker has does not matter if the work does not need it.
Effort looks at the demands of the work itself. It includes the physical or mental exertion needed for the job and the total requirements the job places on the employee. Different kinds of effort do not always make jobs unequal, and occasional or sporadic extra exertion may not justify different pay.
Responsibility concerns the accountability a worker carries. One employee may have added supervisory duties, authority over business decisions, or another obligation that materially affects operations. A minor task, by contrast, may be too small to make otherwise equal jobs unequal.
Working conditions can also separate two jobs. Under federal equal pay rules, this factor focuses on surroundings and hazards, including the intensity, frequency, and seriousness of workplace risks. A department difference or small inconvenience does not automatically show dissimilar working conditions.
Pay means more than base salary. Compensation can include hourly wages, overtime rates, commissions, piece rates, incentive pay, bonuses, profit sharing, benefits, expense payments, or other special pay tied to the job.
Employer explanations also matter. They may include a seniority system, merit system, production-based system, or another factor other than sex. Records help clarify what happened. Job descriptions, job evaluations, wage records, pay policies, merit systems, seniority systems, collective bargaining agreements, and descriptions of pay practices can show how the employer set wages. Those materials can also show whether a stated reason for a pay difference matches the actual work and the way the employer applied the rule.
By the end of an equal pay comparison, the question is no longer whether two position names look alike. The comparison tests whether the employer’s pay explanation matches the work employees actually performed, the compensation each worker received, and the records behind those decisions. That evidence-based view helps separate a pay difference with a documented workplace explanation from one that may require closer review under equal pay rules.
About Chauniqua Young
Chauniqua Young is an employment lawyer and partner at Outten & Golden LLP in New York City, where she represents employees facing workplace discrimination, retaliation, and wage violations. She began her legal career as a Bertha Fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights before joining Outten & Golden LLP in 2014 and becoming a partner in 2021. Chauniqua Young has been named among The Best Lawyers in America for 2026 and a Super Lawyers Rising Star from 2021 through 2023. See more