LOS ANGELES (Legal Newsline) - A woman who said she was fired from a Swiss software company after a high-ranking executive told her she’d never succeed because it was a “boys club” and accused her of being a “bitch” can proceed with her lawsuit, a California appeals court ruled.
The plaintiff, identified as Jane Doe, sold her company to Software One and joined the firm as head of Skype for Business solutions sales. Less than a year later, she attended a sales event in Cancun where, she testified, Chief Executive Patrick Winter “expected the women to join him on stage to dance, and he poured champagne down their throats.”
Doe said she refused to participate and reported the incident to the company. After that, Software One started receiving complaints about Doe and she was reassigned to a different position. About six months after that reassignment, Doe testified, another executive, Jason Cochran, told her the company “is a guys club,” she was “never going to make it” and called her a “bitch.”
Software One’s human resources department “coached” Cochran after Doe complained, but the company told her it didn’t condone his behavior and Cochran had no involvement in Doe’s hiring, promotion or demotion. A few months later, Software One bought another company like Doe's and fired her, citing poor performance and redundancy. Doe sued for discrimination and retaliatory firing.
The trial court initially dismissed the case after Software One argued it had legitimate reasons for firing Doe and she couldn’t prove they were only a pretext. Doe won a retrial, however, after convincing the court she had made a strong enough showing of retaliatory intent to survive summary judgment.
Software One appealed, but California’s Fourth Appellate District, Division Three, upheld the ruling in an opinion published Nov. 8. The trial judge’s decision was not an abuse of discretion, the court ruled.
Software One argued Cochran’s comments were inadmissible hearsay, and the appeals court partly agreed. The “guys club” and “never going to make it” comments were definitely hearsay, the appeals court said, because they referred to facts – Software One’s alleged animus toward women -- that couldn’t be proven otherwise. The “bitch” comment was admissible, because it was offered as “evidence of animus against the plaintiff.”
The trial judge acted within his authority to allow all three in, however, because Cochran had a high position in the company and had “authority to speak, in general terms” about Software One’s company culture, the appeals court ruled.
The fact Doe was told it was “was a `guys club,’ was called a “bitch” by a member of defendant’s leadership team, was demoted and then fired within a relatively short span of time after complaining about defendant’s allegedly discriminatory culture is enough that a jury could reasonably conclude defendant was motivated not by its stated reasons, but by discriminatory or retaliatory animus,” the appeals court ruled.