Two male colleagues got $75K bonuses and VP titles. She got nothing
A court refused to throw out a lawsuit claiming a female manager was paid up to $80,000 less than male peers after an acquisition.
On March 3, 2026, a federal court in Washington, D.C., let stand a pay discrimination lawsuit against Ad Hoc LLC, a digital services company accused of shortchanging a female employee while rewarding her male counterparts with promotions and hefty bonuses after a company takeover.
The case puts a spotlight on a scenario HR professionals know well: the messy, high-stakes business of integrating people and pay after an acquisition. And it is a scenario where, according to this lawsuit, things can go very wrong.
Barati Almas, described in the complaint as a Black woman, was working as an accounting manager at Cascades Technologies when Ad Hoc LLC bought the company in June 2022. She kept her job after the acquisition. What she allegedly did not keep was equal standing with the men around her.
According to the complaint, two male employees who had held program manager roles at Cascades were given $75,000 retention bonuses, elevated to vice president titles, and handed salaries between $70,000 and $80,000 higher than Almas's. She says she received none of it – and neither did the only other woman in a management role at the company.
Almas filed a lawsuit under the federal Equal Pay Act and the D.C. Human Rights Act, arguing that despite the different job titles, her work was substantially similar to that of her male counterparts. All three roles reported to the same executive, involved managing budgets, overseeing teams, and keeping senior leadership informed. The educational and experience requirements, she argued, were also comparable.
Ad Hoc LLC pushed back hard, asking the court to dismiss the case entirely. The company's argument was essentially this: Almas was not doing the same job as the men, and her claim amounted to little more than saying her position was harder or more valuable. That theory – known as a "comparable worth" claim – is one courts have long declined to recognize under the Equal Pay Act.
The court was not convinced that Almas was making such a claim. U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton found that she had laid out enough factual detail to allow the case to move forward, noting that the law does not require jobs to be identical – only substantially equal. The judge also pointed out that the company had misstated a key Supreme Court precedent in its own legal argument, citing the dissenting opinion rather than the majority ruling.
None of this means Almas has won. The ruling clears only the first hurdle, and the litigation continues. The question of whether the roles were truly comparable will face far greater scrutiny as the case moves forward.
But for HR professionals, the case carries a practical message that does not require a law degree to understand. When a company acquires another and begins sorting out who gets what – who earns more, who gets promoted, who walks away with a bonus – those decisions leave a paper trail. When that trail consistently leads to the men and away from the women, it invites exactly the kind of legal exposure this case represents.
Pay equity reviews are no longer just a best practice. In the context of acquisitions, where compensation structures are being rebuilt from the ground up, they are a risk management necessity.
