Eli Lilly has agreed to pay $2.4 million to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission to settle a lawsuit the agency filed, claiming that the pharma giant discriminated against older job candidates by changing its hiring preferences in 2017 to recruit more millennials. In its September 2022 suit, the EEOC alleged that the company intentionally under-hired older candidates for sales representative positions.
As part of the settlement, Lilly is prohibited from discriminating against applicants for primary care sales representative positions based on age, which would violate the Age Discrimination in Employment Act. The agreement will be in place for 30 months and requires Lilly to update its hiring policies. The company must also provide yearly equal employment opportunity training to all managers and human resources staff involved in the hiring process.
The EEOC suit claimed that the company’s violations began after Stephen Fry, the senior vice president for human resources and diversity, noted in an April 2017 Leadership Town Hall that the company had 20% fewer millennials in its sales force than the broader U.S. workforce. Fry proposed that the company target 40% early career hiring. As a result, Lilly managers changed their hiring practices to make it easier to hire younger employees.
According to the EEOC, Lilly intentionally under-hired protected applicants based on age in violation of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967. Even after recognizing these hiring goals were unlawful, the company continued to under-hire candidates protected by the act, the suit alleged. The EEOC claimed these discriminatory practices persisted until 2021.
Lilly did not immediately respond to BioSpace’s request for comment concerning Tuesday’s decision.
In September, a Lilly spokesperson told BioSpace that “the company denies the allegations in the complaint. [The company] remain[s] committed to fostering and promoting a culture of diversity and respect.”
According to the consent decree, Lilly’s settlement agreement with the EEOC should not be taken as an admission of liability toward any of the agency’s allegations.
The EEOC files relatively few lawsuits regarding Age Discrimination in Employment Act violations, making this case relatively atypical. In the year preceding the lawsuit against Lilly, the agency had alleged four violations out of 116 lawsuits, according to STAT News.
On June 2, the EEOC lost an age discrimination suit against Novo Nordisk. The lawsuit, filed in 2022, accused the company of discriminating against a 62-year-old obesity care specialist by denying a job transfer due to age. In this case, a U.S. district court judge ruled against the EEOC’s claims.
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