Claire Schus­ter sup­ported by the AAUW Legal Advo­cacy Fund has won her lat­est legal bat­tle over alle­ga­tions of sex-based pay dis­crim­i­na­tion at Berea Col­lege in Ken­tucky. Claire Schus­ter, a tenured asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of nurs­ing, sued the insti­tu­tion for sex dis­crim­i­na­tion in pay in vio­la­tion of the Ken­tucky Civil Rights Act.

The Ken­tucky Supreme Court issued an Aug. 19^th rul­ing in favor of Schus­ter, deny­ing Berea College’s motion for Dis­cre­tionary Review of the deci­sion of the Court of Appeals in Pro­fes­sor Schuster’s favor, remand­ing for a new trial. Her next state trial court date, at which her lawyers can now use impor­tant dis­cov­ery, has not been set.

Schus­ter alleged, in part, that Berea’s all-female nurs­ing depart­ment had hired its first male fac­ulty mem­ber at a salary that exceeded the salaries paid to female nurs­ing fac­ulty mem­bers, and that he had been hired directly into the asso­ciate pro­fes­sor rank despite his lack of required experience.

Enthu­si­as­ti­cally embraced by the AAUW com­mu­nity, Schus­ter has trav­eled to var­i­ous AAUW events to update mem­bers on her case, which AAUW has sup­ported since 2003. Schus­ter said she was relieved to find that she “was not the only one who felt like this was worth fight­ing for” and that “a national orga­ni­za­tion rec­og­nizes that what hap­pened was very wrong.”

Schus­ter was the keynote speaker at the Geor­gia Annual Con­ven­tion in Colum­bus in 2007.