New York Sexual Harassment Lawyer Blog

This week, the San Francisco Chronicle and Law.com reported that Maya Perez, a transgender woman, filed a sexual harassment and gender discrimination lawsuit against her former employer, Burlington Coat Factory, claiming that while she was a sales associate in their San Francisco store, she had to endure seven years of physical and verbal abuse from her supervisors, colleagues and customers after undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. Perez is one of a handful of transgender people who are litigating such employment discrimination matters.

Perez began working at the San Francisco store in 1996. Perez alleges that after she transitioned from a man to a woman in 2001, fellow co-workers and customers harassed her by pushing and groping her, showing her pornographic magazines and photographs, and calling her names such as “he-she.” The managers and security guards failed to intervene and protect her after they heard and saw the incidents either in person or on the store’s security cameras. The store also prevented her from changing her name tag from “Stevie,” her male name, to “Maya,” her current name. After legally changing her name from “Steven Perez” to “Maya Perez” in 2003, the store forced her to reapply for her position with her new name, even though she had already worked in the store for seven years.

Burlington Coat Factory’s company policy prohibits discrimination based on sex, but it does not make reference to sexual orientation or gender identity as protected classes. After Perez complained to her supervisors and the regional human resource director about the harassment, neither took any steps to investigate the issue, as required by company policy. Perez is seeking punitive damages, emotional distress, back pay and a change in employment policies to ensure that managers and employees are more sensitive toward gender identity matters.

Recently, The New York Times wrote a piece detailing a somewhat predictable side effect of the current economic downturn, predictable in the sense that recessions of years past have resulted in a similar trend: men are feeling the brunt of lay-offs, creating a higher percentage of families being supported by women breadwinners. In fact, women workers are poised to comprise a majority of the American workforce for the first time in the country’s history.

However, looking beyond this fact of increased representation in the workforce, reveals the ominous reality facing families in this economic climate. While women may seem more secure in their jobs in the recession, as the vast majority of layoffs have fallen on male dominated industries such as manufacturing and construction, women tend to find it more difficult to solely support a family because, in general, women who hold full-time positions generally earn only 80 cents for each dollar that their male counterpart earns.

In the face of a deepening recession, we may see challenges to presumed gender roles if layoffs continue to disproportionately fall on men with a new female dominated labor force. It is our hope that women will soon be treated more fairly in the workplace and not be subjected to sex discrimination or sexual harassment as women gain increased representation in the workforce.

A recent article on Occupational Health & Safety Online discussed a study which found that women who have suffered from sexual harassment in the workplace have a tendency to leave the organization. Professor Eran Vigoda-Gadot and research student Chana Levi from the University of Haifa surveyed 192 women who work in the public sector in Israel. The purpose of the study was to determine how sexual harassment in the workplace may or may not change a woman’s behavior in the workplace, the likelihood of a woman to leave an organization following an instance of sexual harassment and to observe how much internal politics and an employee’s belief in her ability to change things affect the behavior of women who have been sexually harassed in the workplace.

The study revealed that women who have been sexually harassed in the workplace have a tendency to leave their jobs. This tendency is caused by several factors relating to a woman’s belief in her own power to change the status quo. Depending on the level of internal corporate politics, women tend to flee rather than put up a fight.

The researchers’ conclusions indicated that “organizations that wish to combat the phenomenon of sexual harassment ought to set clear policies that minimize uncertainty and the risks that confront a female worker who wishes to make a complain.” Women should not stand silent in the fight against sexual harassment in the workplace and should be encouraged to speak up if such an instance occurs, no matter the degree of sexual harassment.

Karin Keegan, a 37-year-old female Delta Airlines flight attendant, is suing JetBlue Airways and Delta Air Lines for sexual harassment. Ms. Keegan complained to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and was given the right-to-sue letters late last year. Due to an agreement, Delta flight attendants are ferried to their job assignments by JetBlue flights. Ms. Keegan claims that a male JetBlue flight attendant denied her access on the work-related flight because she was not dressed provocatively enough. The male JetBlue flight attendant wanted her to wear a lower-cut shirt and tighter pants. When Ms. Keegan changed her outfit to appease the JetBlue attendant, she was told that she was too late to board the flight. In addition, flight attendants of lower seniority were allowed to board the flight without issues with regard to their clothing.

Last week, The New York Times published an article about the United States Supreme Court ruling in Crawford v. Metropolitan Government of Nashville and Davidson County, Tenn., No 06-1595, to expand the protection of Title VII of The Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Crawford was a case of workplace retaliation brought by a witness in a sexual harassment investigation who was terminated after cooperating with the investigator. The issue before the Supreme Court was whether someone who was not complaining about employment discrimination that they themselves suffered was entitled to be protected from workplace retaliation.

In Crawford, Justice Souter, writing for the majority noted that “[N]othing in the statute requires a freakish rule protecting an employee who reports discrimination on her own initiative, but not one who reports the same discrimination in the same words when her boss asks a question.”

The Crawford decision is very significant in that it shows a shift in the interpretation of the Federal Anti-Discrimination and Retaliation laws to mirror more closely the New York City Human Rights Law which was amended in 2005 to broaden employees’ protection from workplace retaliation.