I intended to begin the week with a post about a company’s legal obligation to predict — yes, predict — an employee’s mental fitness for duty. Then, I started on a brief tangent on Ellen Pao, the former partner of a Silicon Valley venture capital firm, who just lost a highly-publicized gender discrimination claim against said…
Articles Posted in Gender
#SOTU and the #Workplace: A full debriefing of last night’s Presidential address
I had every intention of watching the President address the Nation last night. I really did. But, then I got sucked into the Director’s Cut of The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island, the one where the Washington Generals show up first and replace all the confetti with lice. Then poor Lovie…
Is it discrimination to favor a workplace shortie (shawtie?) over her male subordinates?
Because all the other blogs will say “paramour” or “lover” in the lede, and I need to remain relevant (or “down,” if you will) with my more trendy readers. Over the weekend, I read this case in which a male plaintiff alleged discrimination because his supervisor was allegedly schtupping a…
When the supervisor offers an employee $$$ to have sex with his wife, that’s not gender bias, you guys
Terribly sorry about the confusion created by my sloppy use of possessive pronouns in today’s lede. The “his” wife refers to the employee’s wife. Otherwise, this post doesn’t make any sense, does it? (Don’t spend too much time contemplating the question, ok). Yep, just another Tuesday at The Employer Handbook.…
Judge dismisses “Borgata Babes'” claims of weight discrimination
Sex sells. So, when 22 female cocktail servers at an Atlantic City casino pursued claims of discrimination based on their appearance, it came as little shock to me that the judge wasn’t buying. Last month, a New Jersey state court dismissed a lawsuit against the Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa,…
900,000 reasons not to judge a book by its cover
You’ve probably heard of this It’s Just Lunch, a Hallandale Beach-based company, even though you may not realize it. I’ll give you a hint. Have you flown recently? Yeah, that’s right. It’s Just Lunch is a matchmaking service that advertises around page 55 of the in-flight magazine of just about…
Iowa S. Ct. to reconsider if it’s legal to fire an employee for her irresistible attraction
(Betcha didn’t see that lede coming…) So, let me take you back to late December 2012 — a time when my blog was blowing up. Back then, I wrote this post about Melissa Nelson. Ms. Nelson had worked as an assistant to dentist James Knight. That is, until Dr. Knight…
Court countenances canning complainers of consensual canoodling
In Centucky Kentucky, it’s not retaliation to fire employees who complain about sexual favoritism. Then again making apple-pie moonshine and using a butcher cleaver to slice off the arm of a Detroit gangster isn’t frowned upon either. At least, that’s what watching Justified teaches me. But even in Kentucky, they…
It’s legal to fire a female employee because of her “irresistible attraction”
Cue music. Last week, a unanimous Iowa Supreme Court held (here) that it was ok for a male boss to fire a female employee — a model employee — out of concern that he would eventually succumb and do things with her that could jeopardize his marriage. That has to…
Boy meets girl, dates girl, breaks up, calls girl “whore,” gets fired, sues for discrimination
Image credit: atom.smasher.org, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. When a male employee texted his female co-worker and former girlfriend that she was a “whore” and later ignored two protective orders that the female co-worker had taken out against him, I wonder if he was thinking, “Maybe,…