Articles Posted in Gender

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 former employer.

And a few hundred words later, that brief tangent became its own blog post — this one. (If you want a wild lawsuit brought by an airline captain who claimed that his former employer was negligent by failing to predict that he’d have a manic in-flight episode, come back tomorrow). Continue reading

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 female subordinate and treating her better.

(The court said “voluntary romantic affiliation,” but why say in three words, what you can say in one).

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.

Click through for what should prove to be a cluster of a gender discrimination claim contain many valuable takeaways for proactive employers.

Continue reading

(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 fired her in 2010 based on concerns from both he and his wife that if Ms. Nelson continued to work for Dr. Knight, he’d have sex with her and it would ruin their marriage.

So, Ms. Nelson sued for gender discrimination.

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 be gender discrimination!