In Chen v. Jewish Bd. of Family and Children’s Services, Inc., No. 525625/18, 2022 WL 1540178 (N.Y. Sup Ct, Kings County May 13, 2022), the court dismissed, on summary judgment, plaintiff’s claims of gender discrimination and hostile work environment asserted under the New York City Human Rights Law.
As to plaintiff’s discrimination claim, the court explained:
Here, defendants have made prima facie showing that plaintiff’s gender-discrimination claim is devoid of merit. Specifically, defendants have demonstrated that plaintiff was not targeted because of her gender. Adler’s specific questioning of plaintiffs judgment in assigning a medium-statured female to supervise a physically imposing male resident who, in plaintiff’s own words, “did not know his own strength,” was not indicative of gender-based discriminatory intent. Adler’s general comments (as concurred to by Levy) that plaintiff, being a woman, inherently projected fear of others and that a man in her place would not have been hurt, did not (in and of themselves) give rise to an inference that plaintiff’s gender played any role in her employment termination.
More fundamentally, defendants have demonstrated, without opposition from plaintiff, that she violated JBF’s Code of Conduct by questioning the concerned father about his prior complaint to her supervisor about her. In her pretrial testimony, plaintiff admitted that she had informed the concerned father that she was aware of his complaint to her supervisor. The concerned father’s intent underlying his complaint to plaintiff’s supervisor – indirectly wanting to expedite his son’s daycare placement – is irrelevant, inasmuch as plaintiff possessed neither a right nor a privilege under JBF’s Code of Conduct to inquire about the complaint to the concerned father. Accordingly, JBF has offered a legitimate, non-discriminatory, gender-neutral reason for her employment termination. In opposition, plaintiff has failed to raise a triable issue of fact that the stated reason given by JBF for her employment termination – a violation of JBF’s Code of Conduct – was motivated at least in part by an impermissible motive.
Similarly, the court dismissed plaintiff’s hostile work environment claim, noting that while “the comments Adler and Levy made to plaintiff were insensitive, the “conduct complained of consists of nothing more than what a reasonable victim of discrimination would consider petty slights and trivial inconveniences.”