For 34 years, Jennifer Freyd taught as a full-time professor at the University of Oregon’s psychology department. She said she didn’t realize that there were pay discrepancies between her male counterparts and herself until a fellow colleague, Margaret Sereno, brought it to her attention in the 1990s after acquiring public information about professor salaries within the department.
What the two women found in that data led to years of equity battles with UO.
Nearly three decades later, female professors are alleging the same pushback from the university.
Freyd’s work focused on clinical psychology and the psychology of trauma and she has published numerous studies on her work in publications such as the Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, American Psychologist, Psychology of Women Quarterly and many more.
When one of her colleagues back in the late 1980s and early 1990s showed Freyd the salaries of all staff in the psychology department, including her male counterparts, it revealed drastic pay discrepancies.
In the spring of 2016, the UO Psychology Department conducted a self-study and gave the study to the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. They found that the department faced millions of dollars worth of equity problems when it came to full professor-level salaries.
When comparing male full-professor pay to female full-professor pay in the psychology department on a graph, the study showed that the average difference between the two was about $25,000.
This means that over a 20-year span, female full professors in UO’s psychology department received at least half a million dollars less in salary than their male counterparts, not including added recruitment benefits.
UO commissioned an external review of the department in June 2016. The review mentioned the gender disparity in faculty salaries at the full professor-level and recommended that the department “should continue pressing for gender equity in terms of pay at the senior levels of the faculty,” as stated in the legal complaint for Freyd’s case.
“I went to the department head and pointed it out and he said, ‘Oh, you’re right we’ll fix it,’ and then I got a raise and basically a version of that happened several more times over the years,” Freyd said.
This routine continued to happen many times over the course of Freyd’s career at UO. A colleague would alert Freyd of a discrepancy, Freyd would go to the department head and then a small fix was made, such as a temporary salary raise.
But these temporary fixes never solved the root of the issue, she said.
“It was like you were running along on some track and your track has got something wrong with it,” Freyd said about her time at UO. “Every so often someone comes and picks you up and puts you where you might have been if you had a better track but you’re still running on that bad track so you keep falling behind.”
After doing a self-study from 2005 to 2016 with her psychology graduate students, Freyd helped find that nearly all tenured women in the department were getting paid less than the tenured men, especially for full-professors.
Nearly a year later, she checked the data again only to realize that it had not improved at all.
Freyd took the results from the pay discrepancy analysis to other women in the department, and together they met to write a formal letter to the dean.
“I do not like to think about money in general and salary in particular and so at first I avoided looking at the salary column,” Freyd wrote in the letter. “However, it is difficult for me to ignore data.”
Freyd included a graph detailing the regression she formed of the full professor’s salaries in the letter to the dean.
Above the line were six men and one woman. Below the line were two men and five women. Freyd said that she believed this had been the case for her 27 years of work at UO she had put in prior to sending this letter.
“Even if I were to get a raise now that put me well above the regression line,” she wrote “it would be unlikely to make up for 27 years of this treatment.”
She said the dean of the department then wrote a letter to the university dean that the women in the psychology department were getting underpaid.
“They [UO administrators] just denied it, they gave me a bunch of different explanations, but none of them were the same,” Freyd said.
In 2017, Freyd filed a lawsuit against UO after no substantial changes were made to better pay women in psychology to the same level as their male colleagues. She sued UO for sex discrimination under the Equal Pay Act, as well as Title VII and IX, two discrimination laws.
“I’m a professor, I’m not interested in money,” Freyd wrote. “I just don’t want to feel I’m being so disrespected and it’s an injustice and not just for me but all these other people too.”
Freyd and her legal counsel chose four male professors to compare her work to and the court argued that those professors performed duties significantly different than Freyd.
The court argued that male professors used larger equipment and had different jobs than other female professors.
Freyd appealed to the Ninth Circuit, and they ruled in her favor, stating in its opinion that discrimination cannot be made for work of “comparable character” and that requires “comparable” skills.
Freyd said she received $450,000 from the case. Some money went to the nonprofit she founded, the Center for Institutional Courage, some went to her personally and the rest went to expenses from the lawsuit.
“Over the years I got lots of awards from the university and lots of pats on the head so it wasn’t like they didn’t know about my success,” Freyd said. “But it’s like they didn’t want to pay me the same way they would have paid me if I was a man.”
Freyd is not the only woman who has experienced these inequities during their time at UO.
Just a few years later in August 2023, Patricia Lambert, a professor in the College of Planning, Public Policy and Management since 2003, filed a complaint toward UO with a prayer of $549,986 regarding gender discrimination in her employment contract.
In the complaint, she cites that she is paid substantially less than her male colleagues who “hold the same position, are junior to her and are no more accomplished.”
Lambert declined to be interviewed due to legal concerns.
In 2022, Lambert said she was “aggressively” recruited by the University of Florida, causing her to look into comparing salary data available on UO’s website. There she found PPPM’s salaries, which revealed that she was making significantly less than that of her colleagues.
“Additionally, two male associate professors, who were only recently promoted to the rank of full professor, had advanced above her in compensation,” the complaint reads.
According to the complaint, those two professors had five fewer years of seniority than Lambert at the time but had base salaries of $11,283, $4,315 higher than hers.
Lambert began her tenure track as an associate professor in May 2009. She also was UO’s director of the Center for Community Arts and Cultural Policy for nine years while working as an associate professor.
Based on that same data, Lambert was making anywhere between $58,331 to $4,315 less than her male counterparts.
According to the Daily Emerald’s salary guide, today there are four full professors in the College of PPPM. While Lambert makes $143,830, her male counterparts make $146,072 and $156,154.
Eric Howald, a UO spokesperson, said that since the filing of the case, the court has dismissed most of the claims in Lambert’s complaint, leading Lambert’s attorneys to file an amended complaint.
“As noted in the university’s Answer, the University disagrees with the allegations and will address them in the court proceedings,” Howald said in an email. “Due to the ongoing litigation, we cannot provide additional comment on Professor Lambert’s case.”
Margaret Sereno, Freyd’s previous colleague, is a current professor within UO’s Department of Psychology, who focuses on cognitive neuroscience.
In December 2019, Sereno filed a Title IX claim to UO’s Department of Investigations and Civil Rights Compliance, citing pay inequities she found in public salary data within the psychology department. At the time, Sereno was an associate professor and had been working at UO for 28 years alongside Freyd.
The Emerald has reached out to the investigations department, but they were not able to be reached for an interview.
Howald said in an email to the Daily Emerald that there are multiple avenues that the university takes to ensure equitable pay, such as reviews and “pay milestones.”
He also said there are avenues for managers and employees to take to request a review of their pay, including formal complaint processes, such as the one Sereno took.
Sereno found in her research that in the spring of 2019, her salary ranked below most assistant professors.
“The highest assistant professor salary was $5,270 above my salary,” Sereno said in the claim. “The lowest assistant salary was only $1,425 below my salary.”
She added that despite these numbers, some of the faculty members had been at UO for less than a year and only one of the associate professors was senior to her at the time.
Sereno stated in the claim that the associate professor salaries that were above her ranged from $9,506 to $18,402. The second-lowest-paid associate professor was also female, this being the only other female associate professor at the time, to $18,402 above her salary.
About a year and a half later in May of 2021, the university responded to her claim, stating that Sereno’s pay was not discriminatory. The response came from Vanessa Crakes, UO’s current Title IX coordinator.
Crakes found that Sereno was not treated differently than any other faculty member “on the basis of a protected characteristic including, but not limited to, sex,” she said in the claim.
Crakes’ response compared Sereno’s work to the work of other faculty in the department but failed to mention any of Sereno’s accolades.
“Across six years, I had support to go to the Max-Planck Institute for biological cybernetics in Germany, I had a Humboldt fellowship [and] I had money from the Max Planck Institute over multiple years. She doesn’t mention that,” Sereno said.
“The university talks about DEI, the ‘e’ is for equity,” she said. “Your action speaks louder than your words.”
Sereno then responded to Crakes, stating that the analysis was not substantial.
She claimed that Crakes did not take into account pay compression when the salaries of tenured or long-term employees are not far off from newer hires and that her academic record was stronger than all of the associate professors whose salaries were at or below hers.
This dispute continued until she was promoted to full professor, this being her first year as such. According to Sereno, new salaries have yet to be released.
“And the collective bargaining agreement between United Academics and the university prescribes equitable raises at various employment milestones,” he said in an email. “The combination of these mechanisms offers multiple mutually supportive avenues to ensure equitable pay.”
Howald said that the university is committed to supporting faculty successes and creating a culture of equity and inclusion.
Despite these equity issues present on campus, some say it can be hard for faculty members to speak up about the mistreatment they might be experiencing.
Mike Urbancic, senior instructor in UO’s economics department and president of United Academics, UO’s faculty union, described the impact that pay discrepancies can have on faculty members.
“Even the employees themselves might be unaware that they’re in that situation…and it’s not like campus is going to tell them,” Urbancic said.
He also said that not everyone chooses to go to UA to remedy their problems, but that a handful of faculty do come to the union per year regarding equity issues.
“My guess would be three to five,” he said about the number of faculty who come forward with gender equity concerns per year.
Despite legal action being taken by some, the effects of the systemic issues are tolling. For Freyd, she said she still wonders why the equity issues happened in the first place.
“I don’t think they ever really expressed to me any kind of acknowledgment or apology or anything like that nor did they pledge to fix things for future people,” Freyd said, “which is unfortunate.”

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Close-up image of the Johnson Hall sign. Originally built in 1915 with the goal of being an administrative office suite. Eugene, on May 22nd, 2024. (Eddie Bruning/Emerald)