Four veteran journalists for the Detroit Free Press have filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court alleging they were underpaid for years because they are women.

A 20-page complaint was filed by a labor and civil rights attorney, Deborah Gordon of Bloomfield Hills.

Kathleen Galligan, Mary Schroeder, Rose Ann McKean and Regina Boone are the award-winning journalists filing suit.

They allege significant pay differences between female and male employees. The women also say those pay differences affect every category of newsroom employment.

The lawsuit alleges the following:

Male assistant editors make $7.62 an hour more than their female counterparts who are equally qualified.

Women photographers are also paid less than their male colleagues by more than $4 an hour. - The longer women stay, the greater the disparity in pay. Men who have been at the Free Press for 20 years or more make almost $10 an hour more than women with similar seniority.

“The fact is that on the national level women, on average, earn less than men in nearly every single occupation for which there is sufficient earnings data for both men and women to calculate an earnings ratio,” Gordon said.

Kathleen Galligan is an Emmy-award winning photographer and has been at the Detroit Free Press since 2002. Mary Schroeder is an award-winning photographer and editor. Rose Ann McKean is a photographer and designer and Regina Boone is an Emmy-award winning photographer.

Equal Pay Complaint by WXYZ-TV Channel 7 Detroit on Scribd