In Mauro v. New York City Department of Education, No. 21-2671, 2022 WL 17844438 (2d Cir. Dec. 22, 2022), the court vacated the district court’s order dismissing plaintiff’s race discrimination claim, asserted under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, for failure to state a claim.
This decision illustrates the (relatively) low burden for pleading a discrimination claim in federal court.
From the decision:
To survive a motion to dismiss, a Title VII plaintiff must allege only that he is a member of a protected class, was qualified for the job held, suffered an adverse employment action, and can minimally support a claim that the employer was motivated by discriminatory intent.
As to the last prong, the only one in dispute in this appeal, a plaintiff bears only a “minimal burden of alleging facts suggesting an inference of discriminatory motivation,” and may do so by directly or indirectly pleading a plausible inference of discrimination. We have often vacated improper dismissals in discrimination cases where courts apply overly stringent pleading standards, cautioning against imposing “too high a burden on plaintiffs alleging discrimination at the 12(b)(6) stage.”
Discrimination can be inferred from circumstances including, but not limited to, the employer’s criticism of the plaintiff’s performance in ethnically degrading terms; or its invidious comments about others in the employee’s protected group; or the more favorable treatment of employees not in the protected group; or the sequence of events leading to the plaintiff’s discharge.
Applying that standard here, Mauro’s complaint can be plausibly read to allege that non-white teachers and administrators at his school felt he was a poor “fit” because he was white. They then created justifications, through letters to his file and poor evaluations, to fire him. Furthermore, they treated him worse than his fellow non-white teachers who were similarly situated. Those allegations are sufficient to survive a motion to dismiss.
A plaintiff may demonstrate circumstances giving rise to an inference of discrimination by alleging that he was treated less favorably than similarly situated employees of other races. Ordinarily, whether two employees are similarly situated presents a question of fact, rather than a legal question to be resolved on a motion to dismiss. The standard for comparing conduct requires a reasonably close resemblance of the facts and circumstances of plaintiff’s and comparator’s cases, rather than a showing that both cases are identical. Here, Mauro’s claim relies on other non-white probationary teachers who were not fired but who performed similarly; other non-white teachers who committed the same safety violations but who were not disciplined; and a second white probationary teacher who was also disciplined and fired for the same allegedly pretextual violations as Mauro. At a later stage of this litigation, these comparators may well not be sufficient for a reasonable jury to infer discrimination. But on a motion to dismiss, particularly where the plaintiff is pro se, we conclude that Mauro has raised a minimal inference that the chosen comparators may have been sufficiently similar. Further, we have previously held that comments similar to the “not a good fit” comments supported the presence of a material issue of fact on summary judgment because such comments “just might have been about race.” Abrams v. Dep’t of Pub. Safety, 764 F.3d 244, 249, 253 (2d Cir. 2014). Because Mauro’s teaching evaluations worsened only after the “not a good fit” comments, it is plausible that they were contrived to remove Mauro. Combined with Mauro’s allegation that he was assigned more difficult students and teaching assignments than other teachers at the school, the complaint does just enough to nudge his claim across the line from conceivable to plausible. Accordingly, Mauro’s Title VII claim against DOE should not have been dismissed.
[Cleaned up.]
Having reached this conclusion, the court directed the district court to re-address plaintiff’s New York State and City Human Rights Law claims, since it based its dismissal of plaintiff’s “aiding and abetting” claims under those statutes on the absence of plausible allegations of violations of those laws.