Can men really claim that they suffer gender-based job discrimination?
Absolutely. While most people associate gender-based job discrimination as something that’s strictly a women’s issue, gender discrimination can actually affect anyone. While men may not file as many cases alleging gender discrimination, it does happen.
In this particular case, a now-retired court official from Hoboken claims that the city’s officials purposefully withheld information about an open position that would have made him the city’s top court administrator simply because he’s a man and they wanted a woman for the job.
A woman did get the job — one that the retired official claims was less qualified for the role.
While his original lawsuit was dismissed on the basis that he’d never put in an application for the job, the appeals court apparently found his argument that he’d been duped out of knowing it was even an option to be credible. That means his case against the city can now go forward.
In this case, the woman who was hired may have benefited from what is known as “positive stereotyping.” There’s some studies that suggest the women are perceived as being better in certain types of roles, particularly administrative ones or those that require a lot of secretarial-type skills. (On the other hand, men are generally positively stereotyped when it comes to things like engineering jobs.)
Although the former city employee is now retired, the promotion would still affect him today. Had he been promoted, his final base salary would have been more than $30,000 higher than it was. His final base salary was used to calculate his annual pension — which means that for as long as he lives, being unfairly deprived of that position will affect his monthly and yearly income.
Cases like this are important to note because many men don’t recognize that they have the same right to protection against gender-bias discrimination in the workplace as women.
Source: nj1015.com, “Hoboken worker says city discriminated against him for being a man,” Sergio Bichao, Nov. 29, 2017