A former City Hall reporter for the Daily News says she was fired for questioning why a male colleague was earning more for performing the same job.
Anna Sanders, 29, filed a lawsuit on Thursday against the tabloid and its parent company, Tribune Publishing, alleging wrongful termination and gender discrimination. Robert York, the paper's editor-in-chief, is also named in the suit.
Sanders says she learned in April that a newly-hired colleague, Shant Shahrigian, was making $80,000, while she was making $78,000. Prior to Shahrigian's arrival at the paper, Sanders was the outlet's only City Hall reporter.
She raised the discrepancy with York and a human resources representative, describing the gap as a gender pay issue, but her concerns were dismissed, according to the complaint.
The topic didn't come up again until two months later, Sanders said, when she received a call from York and the HR employee informing her that she was being fired for revealing personnel information and disparaging the company.
"He implied that they heard I’d spoken about this pay gap and it’d gotten back to them," Sanders told Gothamist. They offered her 12 weeks of severance to not publicly reveal the reasons for the termination, she said.
Sanders had written a cover story about City Hall's gender pay gap for the Daily News only last year.
"It never occurred to me that I’d be penalized for talking about my salary when this is an issue they thought was important enough to put on their front page," she said. "I was shocked."
Prior to working for the Daily News, Sanders covered City Hall for the Post and the Staten Island Advance. She now works for the legal website Law360.
The lawsuit, which was filed in New York State Supreme Court on Thursday, is seeking unspecified damages.
Inquiries to Tribune, the Daily News, and York were not returned.
