In Moll v. Telesector Resources Group, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in a July 24, 2014 decision) vacated the district court’s dismissal of plaintiff’s sex-based hostile work environment claim.
Plaintiff alleged, inter alia:
[I]n 1998 and 1999, Daniel Irving, a Senior Systems Analyst, left Moll three inappropriate notes. And in 1999, while they were on a business trip, Irving called her hotel room repeatedly and asked her to come to his hotel room. After Irving became her direct supervisor in March 2001, Moll alleges that he left her a note that said he thought about her when he was taking a shower. Moll also claims that Irving would not permit her to communicate with him by email or telephone; she had to see him in person. And Moll claims that throughout his tenure as her supervisor, Irving refused to have her assessed for a promotion claiming that there was a promotion freeze. However, two male colleagues were promoted during this time period.
Plaintiff filed an EEOC charge, alleging that she had been “subjected to different terms and conditions of employment than similarly situated male employees” and a “hostile work environment” and that she had been promoted “to a lower level position than similarly situated males”, and generally alleged retaliation after complaining to Verizon management of sexual discrimination and harassment.
She then sued in court. The district court dismissed her hostile work environment claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the New York State Human Rights Law for failure to state a claim, on the basis that plaintiff “failed to allege that any sexually offensive conduct occurred within the applicable statute of limitations and that therefore her hostile work environment claims were time-barred.”
This, the court held, was error:
We conclude that the district court erred when it failed to consider all allegations in the Complaint in their totality, including those that were not sexually offensive in nature.
A hostile work environment exists under Title VII where the workplace is permeated with discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult, that is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment. To decide whether the threshold has been reached, courts examine the case-specific circumstances in their totality and evaluate the severity, frequency, and degree of the abuse. Facially [sex-]neutral incidents may be included . . . among the `totality of the circumstances’ that courts consider in any hostile work environment claim, so long as a reasonable fact-finder could conclude that they were, in fact, based on sex.
Moll’s Complaint includes both sexually overt and facially sex-neutral incidents to allege a sex-based hostile work environment. The district court should have considered all incidents in their totality—including sex-neutral incidents—before it dismissed Moll’s hostile work environment claims for failure to allege an actionable incident within the applicable statute of limitations.