In Haghnegahdar v. Old Dominion University, No. 2:25-CV-799, 2026 WL 1878607 (E.D. Va. June 30, 2026), the court, inter alia, granted defendant’s motion to dismiss plaintiff’s claim of sex0based hostile work environment under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
From the decision:
The plaintiff alleges that ODU’s conduct—hiring her via a formal process, requiring her to manage a much heavier teaching load, and scrutinizing her about remote work during the summer of 2024—was sufficiently severe and pervasive to create a hostile and abusive work environment. Because the Court concludes that the facts alleged do not meet the criteria for a hostile work environment claim, this claim will be dismissed.
To avoid dismissal of a hostile work environment claim based on sexual harassment, a complaint must include factual allegations sufficient to state a plausible claim that the plaintiff was subjected to: “(1) unwelcome conduct; (2) that is based on the plaintiff’s [sex]; (3) which is sufficiently severe or pervasive to alter the plaintiff’s conditions of employment and to create an abusive work environment; and (4) which is imputable to the employer.” Decoster v. Becerra, 119 F.4th 332, 337 (4th Cir. 2024) (quotation marks and citation omitted). A hostile work environment exists “[w]hen 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 work environment.” Harris v. Forklift Systems, Inc., 510 U.S. 17, 21 (1993) (quotation marks and citations omitted); see also Farager v. City of Boca Raton, 524 U.S. 775, 788 (1998) (“[C]onduct must be extreme to amount to a change in the terms and conditions of employment.”).
“In assessing the legal sufficiency of a plaintiff’s claim, [the court] focus[es] on whether the work environment, when viewed both subjectively and objectively, can be perceived as being hostile or abusive.” Hernandez v. Fairfax Cnty., 719 Fed. App’x 184, 187 (4th Cir. 2018) (unpublished) (citing Harris, 510 U.S. at 22). “Whether the environment is objectively hostile or abusive is judged from the perspective of a reasonable person in the plaintiff’s position.” Id. There is no “mathematically precise test” for determining when a hostile or abusive work environment exists. Harris, 510 U.S. at 22. Rather, courts examine the totality of the circumstances, including (1) the frequency of the discriminatory conduct; (2) its severity; (3) whether it is physically threatening or humiliating, or a mere offensive utterance; and (4) whether it unreasonably interferes with an employee’s work performance. Id. at 23.
Here, the alleged conduct does not entail any “discriminatory intimidation, ridicule, [or] insult,” nor does the plaintiff allege that the conduct interfered with her ability to do her job. Harris, 510 U.S. at 21. Moreover, from an objective perspective, the alleged conduct is not sufficiently severe or pervasive to create an abusive work environment, however objectionable the conditions may have been from the plaintiff’s perspective. See, e.g., Combs-Burge v. Rumsfeld, 170 Fed. App’x 856, 862 (4th Cir. 2006) (unpublished) (“[A]ssigning individuals to difficult jobs [is] not objectively abusive … particularly considering that we do not sit as a kind of super-personnel department weighing the prudence of employment decisions made by [employers] charged with employment discrimination.”) (quotation marks and citation omitted); Faragher, 524 U.S. at 788 (The standard is designed to be “sufficiently demanding” such that it “will filter out complaints attacking the ordinary tribulations of the workplace.”).
Based on this, the court concluded that, “at a minimum, the plaintiff fails to satisfy the third element of the hostile work environment claim, and it must be dismissed.”