Previous case
On July 22, 2026, a unanimous federal jury of seven men and one woman found Nike, Inc. liable on all counts for sex discrimination in pay and promotions against our client, Heather Hender, in Cahill v. Nike, Inc., No. 3:18-cv-01477 (D. Or.). Heather’s trial team included Byron Goldstein of our firm, Laura Salerno Owens of Markowitz Herbold PC in Portland, and Brian Denlinger and Erika Smolyar of Ackermann & Tilajef, P.C. Dardarian Ho Kan & Lee also represented Ms. Hender. The star of the trial was Heather herself: she told the jury in her own words what it was like to be underpaid and passed over at a company she described as a “boys’ club.”
The jury found that Nike willfully violated the federal Equal Pay Act when it paid Heather, an engineer at Nike’s Beaverton headquarters from 2015 to 2020, less than her male peers, and that Nike promoted her more slowly because of her gender. The jury awarded:
The jury deliberated for just over one day following a six-day trial. The trial was confined to Heather’s individual pay and promotion claims, and the jury saw only a three-page excerpt of the “Starfish” survey, an informal questionnaire that women at Nike completed in 2018, collecting their own accounts of discrimination and harassment involving senior people at the company. The rest of the survey and the broader evidence of harassment and discrimination across Nike were kept from the jury after the Court granted Nike’s motions to exclude them as unfairly prejudicial. So, the jury reached this verdict without hearing most of what these women documented. Among the witnesses who testified for Heather was Melanie Strong, a former Nike vice president who helped organize the survey. She told the jury that the senior women behind Project Starfish took it on because they felt a responsibility to change Nike’s culture into one where women could succeed.
In 2018, our clients sued Nike in the wake of the New York Times exposé on the company’s “boys’ club” culture. Class certification was denied in 2022, and the team has moved to appeal that denial to the Ninth Circuit to extend this remedy to the other women at Nike who were subjected to the same discriminatory pay and promotion practices. Read about the ongoing class action appeal here.
* Descriptions and summaries of prior cases and settlements found on this website are intended only to provide information about the activities and experience of our attorneys and should not be understood as a guarantee or assurance of future success in any matter. The results portrayed were dependent on a variety of facts and circumstances unique to the particular matters described, and do not reflect the entire record of the individual attorney(s) involved. Past results are not a guarantee of future results, and the outcome of your particular case or matter cannot be predicted using a lawyer’s or law firm’s past results. Every case is unique and different and should be evaluated on its own merits, without comparison to other cases that may have had different facts and circumstances.
Free consultation by a lawyer. If we can take your case, there are no up front costs or fees.
"*" indicates required fields