New York is home to many highly demanding, intense workplaces, including high-powered law firms. While high-powered employers are entitled to expect that the employees they hire are the best (and let go of workers who do not meet their standards), they are not entitled to make discriminatory firings. Nevertheless, it does happen, and if it happens to you, you owe it to yourself to speak to a knowledgeable New York employment discrimination lawyer about your situation.
One protected group that can often be the target of discrimination when times are tight in a workplace is pregnant employees. Employers may see an employee’s pregnancy as a drain on productivity and seek to purge that worker. Doing so, however, can potentially represent a violation of the law, as a recent New York case shows.
The case involved an associate attorney who worked at the New York office of a major law firm. The attorney began her position in October 2021. In August 2022, she informed one of the partners under whom she worked that she was pregnant. She also told the firm’s HR department of her pregnancy on the same day.
Two months later, the firm fired the associate. When the associate asked for reasons why the firm was firing her, she allegedly received only vague responses about her “failure to meet expectations,” work that was “not up to the firm’s standards,” and the partner’s “low confidence” in her “ability to handle client matters.”
The associate subsequently sued for pregnancy discrimination. The law firm requested that the court grant summary judgment in its favor, which would have ended the case. The court declined, meaning that the attorney was entitled to proceed to a jury trial. The attorney’s success on this critical motion provides a strong example of what it takes, as an employee, to clear all the elements of the three-part test created by the U.S. Supreme Court in McDonnell Douglas v. Green.
In the first step, the employee must establish what the law refers to as a “prima facie case.” This case includes demonstrating that they were a member of a protected class, were qualified for the job they held, encountered an adverse employment action, and that “the adverse employment action occurred under circumstances giving rise to an inference of discriminatory intent.”
The attorney had all of those things. As a pregnant woman, she was a member of a protected class. She was qualified for the job she held, and she was eventually punished (in her case, fired). The firm argued that the attorney had nothing other than the proximity between the pregnancy announcement and the firing to support an inference of discrimination. As the court noted, however, closeness in time (what’s called “temporal proximity”) may, by itself, be enough to raise an inference of discrimination, and a mere two months was a high degree of temporal proximity.
If an employee can demonstrate that someone outside their protected class replaced them, this fact will further support the inference of discrimination. In the attorney’s case, the firm allegedly replaced her with “a male associate multiple years her junior.”
Once the employee clears the first hurdle of demonstrating the existence of a prima facie case, the law shifts the burden of proof to the employer, who must provide a legitimate, non-discriminatory reason for the adverse action it took. In the attorney’s case, the firm alleged that it fired the pregnant woman due to “performance issues,” and provided some specific instances where the attorney allegedly completed subpar work. Those incidents were enough to meet the employer’s burden.
The employer’s meeting its burden moves the test to its third and final phase. In this step, the law places the burden on the employee to demonstrate that the employer’s stated reasons were merely pretexts for its true motivation — discrimination. The court concluded that the attorney met this burden.
As the judge noted, the partner who told the attorney of her termination “framed it as a ‘team decision,’ that was based on thoughtful consultation with other... partners,” but in reality, the partner appeared to have decided by herself to fire the associate. The court also highlighted the “suspect circumstances” under which the firm fired the woman -- namely, two months after the associate announced her pregnancy, “about two months before annual bonuses were to be paid, and while [the] practice group was experiencing an unusual slowdown” in business.
All of those things combined meant that the attorney met her burden, and the firm was not entitled to summary judgment.
As this attorney’s case shows, overcoming an employer’s motion for summary judgment in a discrimination case involves an intensive application of both the law and the specific facts of your case. If you believe you have been the target of illegal discrimination at work, you need a legal team experienced in making effective presentations in this arena. The knowledgeable New York City pregnancy discrimination attorneys at Phillips & Associates PLLC are ready to be that advocate for you. We have successfully represented plaintiffs in pregnancy discrimination cases in both state and federal courts. To learn more about how we can assist you in achieving your goals, please get in touch with us online or call (866) 229-9441 to schedule a complimentary and confidential consultation today.