Nearly everyone has an idea of what they think sex discrimination looks like. Maybe it’s an employer that refuses to hire a male applicant because he’s a man, or an employer that refuses to promote a female employee because she’s a woman. Those are clear-cut examples, but sex discrimination goes further than just that. One area of illegal sex discrimination is when you are punished at work for failing to conform to a certain stereotype generally affiliated with your gender. When that happens, you should contact a knowledgeable New Jersey sex discrimination attorney and explore your legal options.
One example of this kind of discrimination was on display in a federal lawsuit filed by an inspector at a food company’s facility. Allegedly, the employee’s supervisors “constantly” called him a wide array of homophobic epithets. One supervisor derided the employee’s car as “something a [gay slur] would drive.” The inspector, despite his allegedly enduring an onslaught of homophobic harassment, actually was heterosexual.
The judge in the inspector’s case said he could go forward with his pursuit of his employer. Federal law, as it currently exists in the Third Circuit (which includes Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Delaware) doesn’t recognize discrimination claims based on a worker’s sexual orientation or perceived sexual orientation, but does recognize as illegal discrimination based on ‘gender stereotyping,’ which means punishing a male worker for being insufficiently masculine or a female worker for not being feminine enough. The worker need not be gay or lesbian; in fact, the worker in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case on gender stereotyping was a heterosexual woman.