Kathryn G. Mantoan

Of Counsel

San Francisco Office

kmantoan@orrick.com

Read full biography at www.orrick.com

Kathryn (Katie) Grzenczyk Mantoan is Of Counsel in Orrick's Employment Law & Litigation group, working across the San Francisco and Portland offices.  She focuses on high-stakes employment litigation, compliance counseling, and litigation avoidance measures. Her practice has a particular emphasis on complex class actions and developing areas of the law including pay equity and pay transparency, and she co-chairs Orrick's Pay Equity Task Force.

Katie was a part of the trial team that obtained a complete dismissal for Oracle in OFCCP v. Oracle, a high-stakes systemic compensation discrimination case that garnered national media attention. Katie and her co-counsel were named "Litigators of the Week" by American Lawyer for the win.  Two years later, Katie and her co-counsel were named Runners-Up by American Lawyer for securing decertification of a 3,000-person putative equal pay class action for Oracle.

Previously, Katie received California Lawyer’s Attorney of the Year Award in 2016 and was named a Northern California Super Lawyers "Rising Star" for seven consecutive years. She regularly writes and publishes on employment law developments, having presented on topics to three separate state bar associations and a host of national and regional legal and academic conferences.

Katie started her career at Orrick in 2004 and returned in 2015. From 2011 to 2014, she was an associate at a litigation boutique in San Francisco where she handled employment and constitutional law matters.

Posts by: Kathryn Mantoan

Pay Transparency to Current Employees – New Laws Require More Than Job Posting Disclosures

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In 2021, employers had to grapple with a host of new pay transparency requirements across the country, which we previously outlined here.  While most of these concern requirements to provide salary range information to applicants to posted jobs, several require disclosure of salary range information to current employees under certain circumstances.  Employers who have addressed pay range disclosures in job postings are well-advised to also review their practices with respect to current employees to ensure compliance. READ MORE →

Pay Transparency Laws: It’s Not Just Pay Data Reporting Anymore

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While new pay data reporting requirements in California and Illinois have grabbed pay equity headlines, we are seeing a ground swell in another type of pay transparency requirements: mandatory pay disclosures to applicants, current employees, or both.

Pay range disclosure laws go beyond the host of state laws that came online several years ago and establish employees’ rights to request information, disclose, and discuss their own wages.  Rather, these laws obligate employers to affirmatively (and sometimes proactively) disclose the pay range for a given position under specific circumstances.  Employers in nine jurisdictions and counting are subject to such requirements: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Maryland, Nevada, Rhode Island, and Washington, as well as Ohio cities Toledo and Cincinnati.  At present, another nine states have similar bills pending. READ MORE →

DFEH Issues Guidance on California’s New Pay Data Reporting Requirements

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California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing (“DFEH”) has issued new guidance on the pay data reporting law enacted in September (see our coverage here) that established at the state level the equivalent of the EEOC’s discontinued EEO-1 pay data collection form. The law requires that starting March 31, 2021 every California employer with 100 or more employees who files a federal EEO-1 report must annually submit a pay data report to the DFEH.

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Striking Out the “Catch-All”: Growing Number of States Narrow Affirmative Defenses for Employers in Pay Equity Cases

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The federal Equal Pay Act (EPA) and its many state analogs require equal pay for equal (or, in some states, “substantially similar”) work.  The EPA contains a so-called “catch-all” defense to equal pay claims, permitting wage differentials if employers can show that they are “based on any factor other than [protected category].”  But this catch-all defense has been under scrutiny in courts and legislatures around the country. As we recently reported, an en banc Ninth Circuit rejected an employer’s argument that sole reliance on prior pay could be a “factor other than sex” within the meaning of the EPA. The Ninth Circuit’s finding is an outlier among circuit courts in this respect, but it fits a broader trend to narrow the “catch-all” affirmative defense, particularly at the state level. READ MORE →

ARB Said, He Said: Secretary of Labor Announces New Oversight of Administrative Decisions

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On March 6, 2020, U.S. Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia published Secretary’s Order 01-2020, which is among the first of his management decisions since his confirmation back in September. The Order, titled the “Delegation of Authority and Assignment of Responsibility to the Administrative Review Board,” establishes the Secretary’s authority to review, at his discretion, decisions of the Department of Labor (DOL)’s Administrative Review Board (ARB), including decisions arising out of enforcement actions brought by the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (OFCCP). The Order represents a shift in procedure before the Office of Administrative Law Judges (OALJ) and introduces various new process and substantive legal questions to be aware of in connection with contractor pay discrimination enforcement actions. READ MORE →

Ninth Circuit Issues A Second En Banc Decision Regarding Prior Salary Considerations In Rizo v. Yovino Re-Do

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In yet another development in the closely watched case of Rizo v. Yovino, the en banc Ninth Circuit ruled that employers may not defeat a plaintiff’s prima facie case under the Equal Pay Act (EPA) by arguing prior pay is a “factor other than sex” within the meaning of the statute. By doing so, the Ninth Circuit reaches the same result as the previous opinion penned by the late Judge Stephen Reinhardt before his passing in 2018, including overruling Kouba v. Allstate, a prior Ninth Circuit opinion that held that prior pay could justify pay differentials in combination with other factors, and if relied upon reasonably and to effectuate a business policy. The majority opinion further holds that as a matter of statutory interpretation, a “factor other than sex” within the meaning of the EPA must be “job related,” yet it also makes clear that the EPA does not prohibit employers from considering prior pay in making starting pay offers (and in this regard differentiates the opinion from California’s salary history ban). Two separate concurring opinions agree with the result, but they criticize the majority opinion for giving too narrow a reading of the EPA’s fourth “catch all” defense and for embracing a view of prior pay that puts the Ninth Circuit at odds with other circuits and guidance from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). READ MORE →

Oregon Updates Equal Pay Law for 2020

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Oregon employers looking to evaluate their pay equity picture in 2020 should be aware of a handful of updates to the state’s equal pay law that went into effect on January 1.

Oregon overhauled its law in 2017, expanding its coverage beyond sex-based pay differentials and modifying the standard for comparators whose pay must be equal absent a legitimate business justification.  SB123 makes a handful of small but potentially significant changes:

  • Existing law provided that pay differentials can be justified based on a seniority system, merit system, or system that measures earnings by quantity or quality of production. The amendment adds a statutory definition of “system”: “a consistent and verifiable method in use at the time that a violation is alleged.”  Correspondingly, the more onerous definition of “system” that had appeared in OAR 839-008-0015 was repealed.
  • Existing law included a limited statutory safe harbor provision (ORS 652.235), which authorizes a motion to disallow compensatory and punitive damages in suits under the state’s equal pay law if an employer has completed a good faith “equal-pay analysis” within three years pre-suit. That provision was revised to require that a qualifying equal-pay analysis include “a review of practices designed to eliminate unlawful wage differentials.”  The revision also requires an employer attempting to avail itself of the safe harbor to show that it has “made reasonable and substantial progress toward eliminating unlawful wage differentials for the employer’s employees.”  The revision eliminates reference to the specific protected class asserted by a particular plaintiff and instead addresses unlawful wage differentials more generally.
  • The new law provides that evidence that an employer increased an employee’s pay as a result of conducting an equal-pay analysis may not be considered as an admission of liability in an equal pay case under state law.
  • The law authorizes pay differences where an employee performs modified work due to a compensable injury or medical condition, alleviating concerns employers might have had about pay disparities in such circumstances.
  • Finally, the amendment expressly addresses unionized workforces, providing that pay differences can be justified if one or more of the enumerated statutory defenses is contained in a collective bargaining agreement. This amendment may represent an effort to address concerns previously expressed by Oregon employers who employ both non-unionized employees and members of unions that bargain for pay rates along with other conditions of work.  But it is unclear what impact it will have given that the amended law continues to require that the pay differences be tied to one of the previously enumerated defenses.

We will continue to monitor developments and amendments in Oregon and report on them here.

Legislative Update: Washington, New Jersey Join Nationwide Trend of Salary History Ban Laws

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This year has seen states enact a litany of laws aimed at addressing pay equity issues, chief among them salary history bans. We previously reported on these issues here, here, and here. Mid-way through 2019, more and more states continue moving full speed ahead with legislation to bar employers from asking about candidates’ prior salary during the hiring process. Since our last report on this topic, the latest newcomers in this area are Washington and New Jersey. These states (like others) have expressly justified these bans based on legislative findings that “[t]he long-held business practice of inquiring about salary history has contributed to persistent earning inequalities” (see H.B. 1696, § 3(a), 66th Leg., Reg. Sess. (Wash. 2019) (enacted)), while courts evaluating such provisions have found that “more is needed” to establish the presumed connection. See Chamber of Commerce for Greater Philadelphia v. City of Philadelphia, 319 F. Supp. 3d 773, 797-98 (E.D. Pa. 2018). Regardless, though, these laws are now on the books and employers should be mindful of their requirements going forward. READ MORE →

Doctors’ Equal Pay Collective Action Gets Negative Diagnosis

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As readers of this blog know, pay equity laws and regulations are expanding rapidly in the U.S. at both the federal and local level, as well as internationally.  And while regulatory compliance is critical and remains an area to watch (and we’ll keep covering it for you here), employers can take a short breath of relief after a recent victory in one of the key proving grounds for equal pay claims—class and collective action litigation.

On March 29, 2019, in Ahad v. Board of Trustees of Southern Illinois University, the U.S. District Court for the Central District of Illinois decertified an equal pay collective action brought by a group of female physicians.  Although the plaintiff alleged that she and other female physicians were paid less than male comparators for equal or similar work under the same compensation plan, Judge Sue E. Myerscough concluded that the opt-in members of the collective action had widely varying practices, duties, and compensation structures that would require many individualized inquiries, making the case inappropriate for treatment as a collective action.

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Female Athletes Are Looking to Score Big with New Equal Pay Lawsuit

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The world of professional sports has long grappled with criticism of the stark pay differences between male and female athletes – think Billie Jean King’s “equal pay for equal play” push. A recent case brought by twenty-eight players on the United States Women’s National Soccer team (WNT) against the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF) launched the issue back to the forefront of the pay equity arena earlier this month. READ MORE →