In Spann v. FedEx Freight, Inc., 2025 WL 1938355 (5th Cir. July 15, 2025), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, inter alia, affirmed the lower court’s grant of summary judgment on plaintiff’s race- and gender-based hostile work environment claims.
From the decision:
A hostile work environment claim is composed of a series of separate acts that collectively constitute one unlawful employment practice.” Wantou v. Wal-Mart Stores Tex., L.L.C., 23 F.4th 422, 433 (5th Cir. 2022) (citation and internal quotation marks omitted). To succeed, the plaintiff must show that (1) the employee belonged to a protected class; (2) the employee was subject to unwelcome harassment; (3) the harassment was based on the protected class; (4) the harassment affected a “term, condition, or privilege” of employment; and (5) the employer knew or should have known of the harassment and failed to take prompt remedial action. Clark v. City of Alexandria, 116 F.4th 472, 479 (5th Cir. 2022) (citations omitted).
Harassment generally takes the form of “discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, and insult” that rises to the level of “hostile or abusive.” Harris v. Forklift Sys., Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21–22 (1993) (quoting Meritor Savings Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 65 (1986)). “For harassment to affect a term, condition, or privilege of employment, it ‘must be sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the conditions of the victim’s employment and create an abusive working environment.’ ” Wantou, 23 F.4th at 433 (citations omitted). The plaintiff must show subjective awareness of the hostility or abusiveness and that her awareness is objectively reasonable. Clark, 116 F.4th at 479.
The district court initially observed that Spann’s Complaint contained “scattered references to a hostile work environment ….” The district court found that Spann had “not clearly alleged that she was subjected to a hostile work environment based on her race, sex or retaliation, or all or some combination of the three.”
Nevertheless, to the extent Spann was asserting a Title VII claim of hostile work environment based on race or sex, the district court dismissed such a claim as time-barred based on her failure to exhaust administrative remedies. The district court reasoned that there was no reference to a hostile work environment in Spann’s EEOC Charge and no hint of any facts in the Charge that might arguably support such a claim. The district court held that Spann was foreclosed from pursuing a hostile work environment claim under Title VII. See Walton-Lentz v. Innophos, Inc., 476 F. App’x 566, 570 (5th Cir. 2012) (claim of hostile work environment could not “reasonably be expected to grow out of” EEOC charge that did not mention hostile work environment or allege facts to support such claim).7
As to Spann’s § 1981 hostile work-environment claims, they, too, were dismissed because the district court found she failed to allege or to produce evidence that the “alleged misconduct was directed toward plaintiff or motivated in any part by her female gender (or by her race).” The district court thus concluded that “[i]t may have been a hostile, and perhaps even dangerous and frightening work environment; but it was not a sexually or racially hostile work environment.”Spann now says the district court erred, somewhat confusingly arguing that a work environment under § 1981 need only be hostile in general, not “sexual[ly] or racially hostile.” She points to the Admiral Cranfield incident, as well another incident in which an angry employee allegedly made reference to a firearm in his vehicle, as evidence of a generally hostile work environment. But a necessary element of her claim is that the harassment be based on a protected characteristic. See Johnson v. PRIDE Indus., Inc., 7 F.4th 392, 399 (5th Cir. 2021). The “critical issue” in determining whether workplace activities constitute harassment based on sex is “whether members of one sex are exposed to disadvantageous terms or conditions of employment to which members of the other sex are not exposed.” Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc., 523 U.S. 75, 80 (1998) (citation omitted). “Title VII is not a shield against harsh treatment at the workplace; it protects only in instances of harshness disparately distributed.” Jackson v. City of Killeen, 654 F.2d 1181, 1186 (5th Cir. 1981).
Finding that plaintiff “has made no showing of disparately distributed harshness and has thus failed to establish a hostile work environment based on her race or gender,” it concluded that summary judgment was properly granted.