Walt Disney Co. has agreed to pay $43.3 million to resolve a long-running lawsuit brought by a group of female employees who had alleged gender pay discrimination at the Burbank entertainment giant.
The proposed settlement was filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court late Monday.
Disney did not admit fault as part of the settlement. The company has long rejected allegations that it paid women less than their male counterparts and has previously asserted the case conflated the experiences of a small group of women to cast clouds over the company’s pay practices.
“We have always been committed to paying our employees fairly and have demonstrated that commitment throughout this case,” a Disney spokesperson said in a statement. “We are pleased to have resolved this matter.”
In addition to setting up a $43.25-million fund to pay plaintiffs, Disney agreed to hire an “Industrial/Organizational psychologist” to provide training to Disney executives overseeing the organization of jobs. Disney also agreed to hire an outside labor economist to perform a pay equity analysis of certain positions for three years, according to the settlement document.
The lawsuit began in April 2019 with two women — LaRonda Rasmussen and Karen Moore — in Southern California and eventually swelled to nine women who alleged they were being paid substantially less than men who were performing similar duties. Despite Disney’s objections, a Superior Court judge granted class-action status to the case last December, allowing the named plaintiffs to represent thousands of other women who work at Disney and bring their claims under California’s Equal Pay Act.
The class was drawn to include “women who have been or will be employed by a Disney-Related Company in California, between April 1, 2015 and December 28, 2024, below the level of Vice President, and in a salaried, full-time, non-union position,” according to the settlement document.
Part of the issue, the plaintiffs’ attorneys have long maintained, was that Disney hired women at lower salaries, which established a system in which women continued to be underpaid even as they advanced in the company.
San Francisco attorney Lori Andrus first brought the suit. Two other law firms — Cohen Milstein and Goldstein Borgen Dardarian & Ho — eventually joined the case to represent the plaintiffs.
Rasmussen worked as a manager in product development for Disney in Glendale and raised an issue with management that she was not being compensated fairly, alleging that men who held the same title as she were paid from $16,000 to nearly $40,000 more a year, according to the lawsuit.
Months after Rasmussen brought up the issue, she said in the initial complaint that Disney adjusted her salary amount but said the differential “was not due to gender.”
Moore was based in Burbank, working as a senior copyright administrator. In the lawsuit, Moore said she had been discouraged from applying for a manager position.
L.A. County Judge Elihu M. Berle must approve the settlement.