When employees allege discrimination, they must prove an employer’s discriminatory motive and connect it to a particular adverse employment decision. An adverse action requires evidence of a significant change in employment status, benefits, or pay. Usually, the proof comes in the form of failure to hire, a firing, failure to promote,…
Litigators often counsel witnesses to answer, “I don’t recall,” rather than guess or speculate the response to a question at a deposition. But, sometimes, that approach can backfire. The female plaintiff in this recent Third Circuit opinion I read last night worked as a manager in the defendant’s finance department.…
This one (unlike that one) wasn’t even worth five cents. I suppose that’s what happens when you work for an airline and claim gender discrimination after getting fired for posting this publicly on your personal Facebook page: If I were Black in America, I think I’d get down on my…
You guys remember ‘Central Park Karen,’ right? I wrote about her last year. ‘Central Park Karen’ (not her real name) is a white woman who worked as a portfolio manager for an investment company in New York. That is until a video went viral on social media. That video depicted…
The Equal Pay Act (EPA) prohibits employers from discriminating against an employee based on sex by paying lower wages than are paid to employees of the opposite sex for performing equal work. We usually see women assert EPA claims. But men can have them too. For example, in this case,…
About six years ago, five players on the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) filed a Charge of Discrimination with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against the U.S. Soccer Federation (USSF). The women claimed that they were paid up to four times less than their male counterparts for doing basically the same job.…
Image Credit: pxfuel.com When many people think of a “motorcycle enthusiast,” they imagine someone in sunglasses, a leather vest, jeans, boots, and lots of facial hair. And while that describes my Aunt Helen, most folks picture someone like the guy in the photo. By the way, I don’t have an…
Image Credit: Photofunia.com Earlier this week, the Senate failed to advance a measure designed to promote gender pay equity called the Paycheck Fairness Act. If this sounds familiar, it’s because I told you so. As I predicted, sixty U.S. Senators could not agree to end the debate (e.g., filibuster) on…
Adam Jones from Kelowna, BC, Canada, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Yesterday, one of my favorite HR people in the entire galaxy tweeted a link to this article from the AP. The AP reports that “the white woman who was widely condemned and fired after a videotaped dispute with…
Image by Alexander Ignatov from Pixabay Did you know that each time you pay someone less based on their gender, it is a separate violation of the law? “In other words,” said the Seventh Court of Appeals in this opinion, “a new cause of action for pay discrimination arises every…