Here is the lawsuit:
I thought this very odd, as the last place one would expect discrimination against women would be in one of the Seven Sisters colleges.
It does seem odd. More details on the complaint would be helpful. The college states that there are valid reasons that some professors are paid less than others not related to gender. One side may be ‘righter’ than the other in this matter but it may not be clear cut either. Standardized pay for college professors doesn’t make much sense so coincidental differences between any sub-groups are not surprising, but also may reveal hidden discrimination.
I just asked my daughter about this. She’s a graduate of a Seven Sisters college. She says that the perception is that when Vassar turned co-ed, it tried to attract male students by increasing the number of male faculty, offering them generous salaries. That could be a reason behind the persistent salary gap.
For some reason, I am just not surprised that they weren’t able to hold to their value of their women. How terribly sad, but as an experienced female, I am just not surprised. 
I’m in HR, but I’ll have to say right off the bat that compensation is my weakest area as I hate it so very, very much. A few years back we conducted a pay audit to make sure we didn’t have any major wage gaps based on gender for employees in similar positions. I’ll spare you the details, but it was fairly easy because we were only comparing employees apples to apples. i.e. We compared customer service representatives to other customer service representatives.
This is a little more complicated. I would think STEM professors would more difficult to procure and would be compensated at a better rate thatn English professors. But if more women are English professors, does this make Vassar’s pay discrepancy discriminatory?
I’m an adjunct at Vassar, and know one of the plaintiffs slightly, which does not give me any special insight into what might or might not be going on, BUT:
–some years back Vassar was accused of discrimination against female professors–I think the issue was that for some extended period of time, tenure was not awarded to any mom who taught in any science department. I don’t remember how it ended, but as I recall Vassar did not challenge the fundamental truth of the charge, just that “each case is individual and the fact that it adds up to what looks like a pattern is just coincidental, Scout’s honor.”
–There was a separate lawsuit brought against them by a woman-professor-with-kids-denied-tenure in a science department; they said her time out of the workforce meant that she was woefully out of touch with the happenings in her field. She won initially and they were forced to give her a full teaching load. Then the decision was overturned and they hustled her out of there just as fast as they could. I don;'t know the details, the college may well have been right that she was out of the loop, but it didn’t look good.
–In one of the classes I taught several years ago (in a department that has a heavy preponderance of female students) the subject of college admissions came up. This class was 100% women, and they were very upset at what they perceived to be discrimination in admissions against women–the complaint was that lots of men were admitted whose credentials would have kept them out if they had been women.
Again, I’m not by any means an expert on this stuff, despite Vassar signing my (occasional) paychecks, but just to say that there is a pattern here. Off the top of my head, @gkster’s theory may well be right, and manifests itself perhaps in multiple ways.
I couldn’t help being reminded of the famous example of Simpson’s paradox where UC Berkeley had a higher overall admission rate for men than for women, but if you broke it down by department, each department actually admitted a higher proportion of women than men. It’s just that women tended to apply to more competitive departments.
I have no idea whether anything like that explains the situation at Vassar.
I wonder if it’s that this issue at Vassar is just more headline-worthy because of the school’s history, making a pattern appear more distinct, or if it is more widespread but less noteworthy at other schools with a more typical history.
The latter, definitely. Gender pay gap among college and university faculty is a known issue.
The causes are complicated, and include the effect of more senior (and thus better-paid) faculty being more disproportionately male than junior faculty, since there were fewer women in academia when the older professors started out.
From the OP’s link:
My linked article above notes that in research-university contexts, female faculty might be more likely to sacrifice direct compensation to get extra funding for a grad student, and/or might not be as assertive in salary negotiations (the latter factor may play a role at undergrad institutions too, of course).