In Mercedes v. New York City Department of Education, 2019 WL 4926968 (2d Cir. 2019) (Summary Order), the court affirmed the dismissal of plaintiff’s gender discrimination, hostile work environment, and retaliation claims under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
With respect to the gender discrimination claim, after summarizing the relevant law, applied it to the facts:
We find that Mercedes failed to offer sufficient evidence to permit a reasonable trier of fact to conclude that DOE’s nondiscriminatory reasons for Mercedes’s termination were in fact a mere pretext for discrimination. Mercedes failed to present evidence that her supervisor, Principal Polanco, harbored animus towards Mercedes because of her sex. Mercedes admitted that Polanco never made derogatory gender-based comments to her. The fact that Polanco hired a female assistant principal and treated her equivalently to the male assistant principals, though not determinative, further vitiates Mercedes’s claim that Polanco acted with a gender bias. A rational trier of fact presented with this evidence could not infer that discrimination was the real reason for Mercedes’s termination.