In Rasmy v. Marriott International, Inc., 952 F.3d 379 (2d Cir. March 6, 2020), the court vacated the district court’s grant of summary judgment to defendant on plaintiff’s hostile work environment and retaliation claims. Here I will discuss the court’s evaluation of plaintiff’s hostile work environment claim.
In particular, the court faulted the lower court for applying an improperly rigid test. From the decision:
In finding that Rasmy’s allegations did not constitute “severe” harassment, the District Court relied substantially on Mathirampuzha v. Potter. Mathirampuzha, however, is inapposite. In that case, our analysis addressed a disparate-treatment claim, rather than allegations of a hostile work environment. We held that an assault did not constitute an “adverse employment action” for purposes of the third prong of establishing a prima facie case in a disparate-treatment case. And even if the assault in Mathirampuzha were analyzed for purposes of determining whether a hostile work environment existed, the question presented was whether a “single event, if extraordinarily severe, could alter the conditions of a working environment.”
By contrast, here Rasmy has alleged numerous incidents of discriminatory harassment over the course of at least three years, and he claims that despite his repeated complaints to various persons in Marriott management, Marriott failed to respond appropriately.48 In examining the question of the severity of Defendants’ alleged discriminatory conduct and its effect on Rasmy, we consider relevant the total impact on Rasmy of the many alleged episodes of harassment over the course of three years. The District Court’s comparison of the facts to those in Mathirampuzha created “a rigid ‘calculat[ion] and compar[ison]’ methodology [that] ignore[d] the proper role of courts … at the summary judgment stage … [and], if strictly followed, disregards Supreme Court guidance that hostile environment analysis ‘is not, and by its nature cannot be, a mathematically precise test.’ [Citations omitted.]
In addition, the district court found that while a jury could find “pervasive” harassment that was “offensive” and “degrading”, the harassment was not actionable “because there is nothing in the record from which a reasonable jury could conclude that the alleged discrimination altered the conditions of [plaintiff]’s employment” and that plaintiff “had not alleged that he had been physically threatened or that the claimed harassment, had interfered with his job performance.”
The Second Circuit found that this analysis “misreads Title VII” and “ignores the very reason that Title VII prohibits discriminatorily hostile work environments.”
Specifically:
Although the presence of physical threats or impact on job performance are relevant to finding a hostile work environment, their absence is by no means dispositive. Rather, the overall severity and pervasiveness of discriminatory conduct must be considered. By its very nature that determination is bound to raise factual disputes that likely will not be proper for resolution at the summary judgment stage. In this case, there is a reasonable inference that Rasmy participated in a physical altercation as part of a deteriorating job performance caused by the alleged hostile work environment. Moreover, in its calculation of the severity of the discrimination Rasmy claimed, the District Court did not credit Rasmy’s sworn statements that the harassment made him “chronically nervous,” that he began to “cr[y] regularly,” and that he started seeing a psychiatrist who prescribed him anti-anxiety medication, all of which arguably gives rise to a strong inference that Rasmy’s workplace conditions had been materially altered.
The court concluded that, to that extent, plaintiff “presented disputed issues of material fact that should be resolved by a jury, not the court.”