Pregnancy Discrimination Case Dismissed

In Ramsaran v. Booz & Co. (N.A.) Inc., No. 1:14-CV-708-GHW, 2015 WL 5008744 (S.D.N.Y. Aug. 24, 2015), the Southern District of New York granted defendant’s motion for summary judgment on plaintiff’s pregnancy discrimination claim.

In sum:

After a series of documented negative reviews regarding her job performance, Ms. Ramsaran was fired. At the time that she was terminated, Ms. Ramsaran was pregnant, and away from the office for bed rest. Consequently, Ms. Ramsaran claims that she was discriminated against on the basis of her pregnancy. In support of that claim, Ms. Ramsaran relies principally on the fact that the termination took place after the defendants became aware that she was pregnant, and that she “felt discriminated against when she was terminated.” Because these are insufficient grounds to establish that her employer’s well-documented justification for her termination was pretext for discrimination, defendants’ motion for summary judgment is GRANTED.

This case illustrates, among other things, that “poor performance” is a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason for terminating an employee (even a pregnant one), and that when evaluating claims of discrimination under Title VII, “the issue is the defendants’ motivation in terminating plaintiff, not the adequacy of her performance as an employee.”

In addition, the court rejected plaintiff’s reliance on her disagreement with defendants’ assessment of her job performance (and her attack on the reliability of the evidence supporting the company’s conclusions), explaining:

[T]he reliability of the evidence is only relevant to the truth of the allegations about plaintiff’s poor performance, and in a case like this, the Court is decidedly not interested in the truth of the allegations against plaintiff [but rather] must analyze what motivated the employer.

Plaintiff cannot create a genuine dispute of material fact by producing evidence that she did some good work, or even that she received some good feedback from her colleagues. Even if there were a genuine dispute about her job performance, it would be immaterial, as it would be relevant only to prove the inaccuracy of defendants’ assessment. Even assuming Booz’s assessment of plaintiff’s job performance was inaccurate, what is significant is that they based their decision to dismiss plaintiff on that belief, rather than her gender or pregnancy.

Where a plaintiff has been terminated …, the question is not whether the employer reached a correct conclusion …, but whether the employer made a good-faith business determination. And while it is possible to dispute whether various pieces of evidence about Plaintiff’s performance … really justified [her termination], to do so would require a court to sit as a super-personnel department to reexamine whether an employee’s performance was really deficient, something that … courts should not do. Here, too, the Court declines to sit as a super-personnel department and evaluate whether plaintiff’s performance was really deficient. It is well documented that defendants believed that it was.

Also, “[n]either the temporal proximity of plaintiff’s announcement of her pregnancy to her termination, nor the temporal proximity of plaintiff’s pregnancy-related disability leave to her termination, are sufficient on their own to support a finding of pretext.”

Finally, the court rejected plaintiff’s argument that she “felt discriminated against when she was terminated”, reasoning:

In the absence of any other evidence of the defendants’ discriminatory intent, however, Ms. Ramsaran’s feelings about her discharge are not sufficient for plaintiff to meet her burden to come forward with evidence of discrimination. If a bare affirmation that a plaintiff felt discriminated against was sufficient to defeat summary judgment, summary judgment in employment discrimination cases would be rare.

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