BNSF must face sex discrimination suit: Appeals court

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission provided sufficient evidence of sexual discrimination against a female railroad worker for the case to proceed, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday.

In Equal Employment Opportunity Commission v. BNSF Railway Co., the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis overturned a lower court’s summary judgment ruling in favor of BNSF.

The case focused on allegations by a train conductor that she and other women faced sex-based harassment, unequal treatment, and retaliation from 2011 to 2018, when she filed a discrimination charge with the EEOC.

The conductor, who died in 2023, alleged dozens of incidents, including that male employees made unwelcome advances, inappropriate comments about women’s bodies and explicit jokes, and that sexual graffiti and drawings were perpetually on display. In addition, she claimed that male workers soiled washrooms and took other actions in retaliation for her complaints.

BNSF argued that several of the alleged incidents were time-barred and could not be included in the cumulative evidence, that the EEOC failed to show that all the women experienced the same acts by the same male employees at the same time and that conduct toward the conductor was not sufficiently severe or pervasive.

The appeals court ruled that the evidence from outside of the time-bar could be considered as part of the overall hostile work environment, that the lower court wrongly required the EEOC to show that the other women suffered exactly the same harassment as the conductor and that a jury could find that the work environment “was intimidating and humiliating to women.”

The appeals court remanded the case for further proceedings.

BNSF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.