Opinion ID: 77975
Heading Depth: 3
Heading Rank: 5

Heading: Our Severe or Pervasive Determination

Text: After considering the Supreme Court's four factors in light of the totality of the circumstances in which Reeves worked at CHRW, we hold that a reasonable jury could find that the harassment Reeves faced was sufficiently pervasive to alter the conditions of her employment. We agree with the Sixth Circuit that a work environment viewed as a whole may satisfy the legal definition of an abusive work environment, for purposes of a hostile environment claim, even though no single episode crosses the Title VII threshold. Williams v. Gen. Motors Corp., 187 F.3d 553, 564 (6th Cir.1999). Reeves has presented evidence of sufficient pervasiveness to survive summary judgment, even if none of the incidents she has described, standing alone, would be actionable. Accordingly, this case can only be appropriately resolved after a jury weighs the factors and decides whether the harassment was such that a reasonable person would have felt that it affected the conditions of her employment. We recognize that the conduct at issue here is not what typically comes to mind when one thinks of sexual harassment under Title VII. We were careful in Mendoza, moreover, not to establish a baseline of actionable conduct that is far below that established by other circuits, Mendoza, 195 F.3d at 1251, or trivialize true instances of sexual harassment. Id. at 1252 n. 10. Furthermore, summary judgment is meant to police [that] baseline for hostile environment claims. Id. at 1244. Nevertheless, what Reeves experienced at CHRW was not the ordinary socializing, Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc., 523 U.S. 75, 81, 118 S.Ct. 998, 1003, 140 L.Ed.2d 201 (1998), or ordinary tribulations of the workplace, such as the sporadic use of abusive language, gender-related jokes, and occasional teasing that the severe or pervasive element is meant to filter out. Faragher, 524 U.S. at 788, 118 S.Ct. at 2284. As we mentioned earlier, either severity or pervasiveness can form the basis of a hostile work environment claim, and our holding today focuses on the latter. While it would be impossible to find a prior case that perfectly supports our reasoning, two of our sister circuits have held that similar facts satisfied the severe or pervasive element on pervasiveness specifically. In Lauderdale v. Texas Dep't of Criminal Justice, 512 F.3d 157, 158 (5th Cir. 2007), the Fifth Circuit recently held that evidence of frequent but non-severe harassment was sufficiently pervasive to survive summary judgment. The relevant harassment in Lauderdale consisted of multiple nightly phone calls from the plaintiff's supervisor for nearly four months. [7] Id. at 158. While the calls clearly indicated the supervisor's romantic interest in the plaintiff, the call that was most sexual in nature merely invited the plaintiff to travel to Las Vegas with the supervisor and snuggle. Id. In reversing the district court's entry of summary judgment, the Fifth Circuit panel declared that frequent harassment can be sufficiently pervasive to create a hostile work environment even if the individual incidents of harassment are not severe. Id. In Dominguez-Curry v. Nevada Transp. Dep't, 424 F.3d 1027 (9th Cir. 2005), the Ninth Circuit reached a similar conclusion when it was faced with evidence of pervasiveness. The plaintiff testified that her supervisor told sexually explicit jokes like every day, id. at 1035 (internal quotation marks omitted), and that she could write a book about all the times her supervisor had said that he did not think the plaintiff, or a female generally, could do the work that a man is required to do. Id. (internal quotation marks omitted). The Ninth Circuit panel held that the evidence of sexually explicit jokes and demeaning comments was more than sufficient to create genuine factual disputes. . . as to both the severity and pervasiveness of [the supervisor's] conduct. Id. (emphasis added). Just as the plaintiffs did in Lauderdale and Dominguez-Curry, Reeves has presented evidence of pervasive conduct that is sufficient to survive summary judgment.