## Facts

- A class of nurses employed by the City and County of Denver, led by Mary Lemons, challenged the City’s compensation practices for nursing positions.
- Denver used a citywide job classification and pay plan covering all municipal employees, with written job descriptions and designated “key classes” for external comparison.
- The stated objective of the plan was to align city pay for like jobs with compensation in the surrounding community.
- Nursing positions (including Graduate Nurse I and Licensed Practical Nurse I) were included among key classes surveyed annually against non-city labor market rates.
- The nurses did not claim they were paid less than other nurses in the local labor market; they argued the market wage for nursing was itself depressed due to historical sex discrimination in a predominantly female occupation.
- Plaintiffs contended that tying municipal nursing pay to community nursing wages perpetuated sex-based wage inequality and that nursing work should be compensated more like better-paid, male-dominated city classifications (including administrative positions) alleged to be comparable in value.
- Plaintiffs brought claims under Title VII and under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 alleging an Equal Protection Clause violation.

## Issues

1. Whether a municipality violates Title VII by setting nurses’ wages at prevailing community rates when plaintiffs allege those market rates reflect historical sex discrimination against a female-dominated occupation.
2. Whether the City’s classification and pay plan violated the Equal Protection Clause (enforceable via § 1983) by maintaining lower pay for nurses than for allegedly comparable, male-dominated positions without proof of discriminatory purpose.

## Decision

- The district court entered judgment for the City on all claims.
- The court rejected the Title VII wage-discrimination theory premised on correcting alleged market-wide undervaluation of nursing.
- The court rejected the equal protection claim for failure to establish a constitutional violation.
- The judgment was later affirmed on appeal.

## Legal Principles

- An employer’s use of prevailing external labor market rates to set pay, applied on a facially neutral and systemwide basis, does not by itself establish sex discrimination under Title VII.
- Title VII does not impose a general requirement that employers equalize pay across different job classifications based on asserted “comparable worth” when the employer pays the job at issue consistently with market rates and without sex-based differentials among employees within the job.
- An equal protection claim challenging a compensation system requires proof that the government acted with discriminatory purpose, not merely that a pay structure mirrors broader societal disparities.

## Conclusion

The court held that Denver’s market-based, facially neutral classification and pay system did not violate Title VII or equal protection merely because plaintiffs alleged the external market undervalued nursing as women’s work, and it declined to require judicially imposed wage adjustments across dissimilar job classes based on comparable-worth comparisons.


Lemons v. City of Denver, 17 Fair Empl. Prac. Cas. 906 (D. Colo. 1978)