Articles Posted in Sex

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Employers don’t have crystal balls.

Last week, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals reaffirmed the well-settled rule that when one coworker accuses another of creating a hostile work environment, that claim will fail ten times out of ten unless the employer knew or should have known about the harassment but failed to take prompt and adequate remedial action. It’s otherwise known as respondeat superior liability.

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Yesterday, the EEOC announced that it had sued an employer for allegedly denying a new hire request to leave training early for an urgent medical evaluation related to her pregnancy and rescinded her job offer.

These are just allegations. However, according to the EEOC complaint, the federal discrimination watchdog appears to have the receipts to back them up. Continue reading

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Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits employers from discriminating against employees and applicants based on sex. In 2020, the Supreme Court interpreted Title VII’s ban on sex discrimination to include employer bias based on sexual orientation.

But, did you know that in about half the country, a heterosexual employee who believes that their employer discriminated against them based on their sexual orientation must also establish “background circumstances” on top of Title VII’s other requirements to establish that their employer is the “unusual” one who discriminates against the majority to sustain a claim?

What exactly are “background circumstances”? Continue reading

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In 2015, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined that a federal agency that denied an employee equal access to a common bathroom/facility corresponding to the employee’s gender identity discriminated based on sex and could not restrict a transgender employee to a single-user restroom. About five years later, the Supreme Court ruled that discrimination based on transgender status is sex discrimination in violation of Title VII.

Yesterday, the EEOC announced a lawsuit against several employers claiming that forbidding transgender workers from using restrooms consistent with their gender identity contributed to a hostile work environment based on their sex.
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Readers of this blog know that the EEOC recently finalized its new workplace harassment guidance and that one of the contentious issues in the guidance, according to a dissenting EEOC Commissioner, is the EEOC’s position that misgendering an employee, e.g., by consistently using the wrong pronouns, can violate Title VII. Continue reading

“Doing What’s Right – Not Just What’s Legal”
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