Across retail stores, hotels, restaurants, and custodial services, a troubling trend persists where job titles are strategically used to deny workers overtime pay. Workers can be assigned titles including “assistant manager,” “team lead,” or “coordinator”, and are made exempt and lose overtime pay despite spending the majority of their time performing the same tasks as hourly employees—stocking shelves, running cash registers, cleaning rooms, or serving customers.

An investigation by Schneider Wallace shows that this practice may not affect all workers equally. Women are significantly more likely than men to hold job titles linked to misclassification when Schneider Wallace reviewed LinkedIn job title data as of May of 2025. This form of wage theft not only undercuts their earnings, but deepens existing gender pay gaps in frontline industries.