Court Opinion

ID: 9493328
Source: CourtListenerOpinion
Date Created: 2023-08-05 15:05:09.706623+00
Date Added: 2024-06-11T17:55:47.081926
License: Public Domain

ILANA DIAMOND ROVNER, Circuit Judge,
dissenting in part.
When my nomination to the Court of Appeals was announced in 1992, the late Judge Walter J. Cummings wrote me a kind note of congratulations that ended with the observation, “At long last, the ladies’ room off the [judges’] conference room will have some use!”
Thank goodness there was a women’s room! When women like Audrey Jo De-Clue arrive in workplaces that hitherto were all-male, they often discover that the facilities for women are inadequate, distant, or missing altogether. See Gail Collins, Potty Politics: The Gender Gap (Installation of Bathrooms for Women), Working WomaN, March 1, 1993, at 93. Women know that this disparity, which strikes many men to be of secondary, if not trivial, importance, can affect their ability to do their jobs in concrete and material ways. As recently as the 1990s, for example, women elected to the nation’s *438Congress — which had banned gender discrimination in the workplace some 30 years earlier — found that without careful planning, they risked missing the vote on a bill by heeding the. call of nature, because there was no restroom for women convenient to the Senate or the House chamber. See Catherine Strong, When a congressman needs a commode, he strides ..., Assooiated Press, June 22, 1997; Lois Romano, On the Hill, The Gender Trap; Breaking Into the Congressional Cloakroom, Washington Post, March 6, 1990, at Cl. '
As my colleagues acknowledge, when an employer provides no restrooms at all to its employees and expects them to relieve themselves outdoors, the burden falls more heavily on women than it does on men. Ante at 436. Not simply because women may be more reticent about relieving themselves in the open, I might add. See ante at 436. The fact is, biology has given men less to do in the restroom and made it much easier for them to do it. If men are less reluctant to urinate outdoors, it is in significant part because they need only unzip and take aim. And although public urination is potentially a crime whether committed by a man or a woman, see, e.g., People v. Duncan, 259 Ill.App.3d 308, 197 Ill.Dec. 581, 631 N.E.2d 803, 804 (1994) (disorderly conduct); Elliott v. State, 435 N.E.2d 302, 303-04 (Ind.App.1982) (public indecency), the risk of being caught in the act is arguably greater for women, for whom it is a more cumbersome, awkward, and time-consuming proposition.1 For all of these reasons, I agree with my brothers that an employer’s failure to provide restroom facilities for its workforce can support a disparate-impact claim for female employees. Ante at 436.
But there are respects in which the refusal to provide female employees with restrooms can be understood as creating a hostile work environment as well. See Kline v. City of Kansas City, Mo., Fire Dep’t, 175 F.3d 660, 668 (8th Cir.1999) (as to hostile environment claim, error to exclude evidence of ill-fitting clothing and unequal bathroom facilities provided to female fire department employees), cert. denied, - U.S. -, 120 S.Ct. 1160, 145 L.Ed.2d 1072 (2000). Restroom facilities are, after all, the norm in the workplace, and the refusal to provide such facilities to workers is, most would agree, an act which alters the terms and conditions of one’s employment. See generally Meritor Sav. Bank, FSB v. Vinson, 477 U.S. 57, 67, 106 S.Ct. 2399, 2405, 91 L.Ed.2d 49 (1986) (describing elements of hostile environment claim). There may be some work environments in which it is not feasible to make any type of relief facilities available to employees, but DeClue’s was not one of them. For at least one two-week period, she was given the' use of a “port-a-potty”, and eventually, after she filed a charge with the EEOC, the company began providing “Brief Reliefs” (disposable urine bags) and privacy tents for DeClue and the other lineworkers to use at jobsites. Granted, the refusal to provide restrooms and comparable facilities is somewhat different from the affirmative acts of sexual and sex-based harassment that we typically see in hostile environment cases. Cf. 29 C.F.R. § 1604.11(a) (2000); Baskerville v. Culligan Int’l Co., 50 F.3d 428, 430-31 (7th Cir.1995). Nonetheless, when, in the face of complaints, an employer fails to correct a work condition that it knows or should know has a disparate impact on its female employees — that reasonable women would find intolerable — it is arguably fostering a work environment that is hostile to women, just as surely as it does when it fails to put a stop to the more familiar types of sexual harassment. Cf. Guess v. Bethlehem Steel Corp., 913 F.2d 463, 465 (7th Cir.1990). Indeed, the cases teach us that some employers not only maintain, but deliberately play up, the lack of restroom *439facilities and similarly inhospitable work conditions as a way to keep women out of the workplace. See, e.g., Catlett v. Missouri Highway and Transp. Com’n, 828 F.2d 1260, 1265-66 (8th Cir.1987), cert. denied, 485 U.S. 1021, 108 S.Ct. 1574, 99 L.Ed.2d 889 (1988); Kilgo v. Bowman Transp., Inc., 789 F.2d 859, 874-75 (11th Cir.1986); see also E.E.O.C. v. Monarch Machine Tool Co., 737 F.2d 1444, 1447 (6th Cir.1980); see generally Vicki Schultz, Telling Stories About Women and Work: Judicial Interpretations of Sex Segregation in the Workplace in Title VII Cases Raising the Lack of Interest Argument, 103 HaRV. L.Rev. 1749,1832-39 (1990).
The evidence in this case supports a hostile environment claim. First, although DeClue complained about the lack of relief facilities repeatedly, the electric company did not make them available on a consistent basis until late 1997 or early 1998, after she filed her EEOC charge. Second, the alternatives that the company offered in response to DeClue’s complaints — the use of a truck to drive to the nearest public facility, or summoning a supervisor or troubleshooter to take her to such a facility when a truck was unavailable— were both impractical (the nearest restroom might be ten or twenty miles away from the jobsite, as might be the nearest supervisor or troubleshooter, see DeClue Dep. vol. 1 at 120-22) and served only to stigmatize her. Her co-workers, in fact, made harassing remarks about this very subject,2 and in one of DeClue’s performance evaluations, her crew leader wrote that “a wom[a]n on the job of this type makes it hard with restroom facilities.” DeClue Dep. Ex. 11 at 2.3 Third, on job-sites that were literally out in the open, with no trees or shrubs to hide behind, male and female workers were forced to relieve themselves with almost no privacy whatsoever: DeClue’s male co-workers regularly urinated in her presence (a practice that she complained about to no avail); and on at least one occasion, she discovered to her chagrin that the bulldozer behind which she had chosen to relieve herself had given her privacy from her co-workers and passing traffic, but not from a crotchety resident who lived nearby. DeClue Dep. vol. 1, at 126-28. Fourth, the lack of appropriate accommodations deprived De-Clue of privacy among male co-workers who made a habit of keeping (and presumably viewing) pornographic magazines in company offices and in many company trucks — a practice that could only have increased the discomfort DeClue (and any reasonable woman) would have experienced relieving herself in the open. I dare say that if the tables were turned, and all but one of the employees in this environment were women, a reasonable man would be equally reticent to drop his trousers in order to relieve himself. DeClue’s complaints are proof enough that she found the lack of relief facilities objectionable, and these circumstances certainly permit the inference that any reasonable woman would have felt the same. The defendant’s failure to remedy the problem in turn could be viewed as. a negligent response that subjects it to liability for a hostile work environment. Cf. Guess, 913 F.2d at 465.
Discrimination in the real world many times does not fit neatly into the legal models we have constructed. Venters v. City of Delphi, 123 F.3d 956, 975 (7th Cir.1997); Tomsic v. State Farm Mut. Auto. Ins. Co., 85 F.3d 1472, 1476 (10th Cir.1996). The hostile environment theory *440itself was not one that Congress anticipated or provided for in the express terms of Title VII, but instead is one that scholars, the E.E.O.C., and judges have fashioned in acknowledgment of a very real and invidious form of sex discrimination in the workplace. See Meritor, 477 U.S. 57, 106 S.Ct. 2399, 91 L.Ed.2d 49.4 Because prejudice and ignorance have a way of defying formulaic constructs, the lines with which we attempt to divide the various categories of discrimination cannot be rigid. DeClue’s complaint, insofar as it concerns the lack of restroom facilities, may fit more naturally into the disparate-impact framework that my colleagues discuss, but it also overlaps with the hostile environment framework into which she has placed it. It should be allowed to proceed within that framework.
Therefore, although I join my colleagues in concluding that DeClue cannot complain of discriminatory incidents that occurred outside of the limitations period (ante at 435-36), I respectfully dissent from their holding that the failure to provide appropriate relief facilities-which failure did occur within the limitations period — cannot be pursued as a hostile environment claim.

. DeClue herself was the subject of at least one complaint from a customer who saw her urinate outdoors. DeClue Dep. vol. 1 at 125-29.

. Her crew leader, for example, allegedly made the following types of remarks: "You're just like my damn kids. I'm ready to leave and I have to wait for them to go to the bathroom”; "You’ve got the bladder of a three-year-old”; and "We’ll never get to the job ‘cause I’m sure we'll have to stop in Edwards for you to piss there too.” Complaint at 7 ¶ 39.

. Her employer removed the comment from the evaluation at DeClue’s request. See De-Clue Dep. Ex. 11A, at 2.

. For another example of how our thinking about discrimination has evolved, consider the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e(k), which made clear that Title VII's ban on sex discrimination included discrimination based on pregnancy and so overruled General Elec. Co. v. Gilbert, 429 U.S. 125, 97 S.Ct. 401, 50 L.Ed.2d 343 (1976). Gilbert held that a workplace insurance plan covering non-occupational disabilities other than pregnancy did not discriminate against women per se, but simply favored "nonpregnant persons” over pregnant women. See id. at 135, 97 S.Ct. at 407, quoting Geduldig v. Aiello, 417 U.S. 484, 496-97 n. 20, 94 S.Ct. 2485, 2492 n. 20, 41 L.Ed.2d 256 (1974).