Protecting Victims of Gender Discrimination and Harassment

There are people of different genders and sexual orientation in California. These differences between genders and sexual orientation should have no effect on how people treat them though. This includes while people are at work. Employers should only be evaluating their employees based on their work performance. Unfortunately, there are many employers who do make their decisions based on gender or sexual orientation.

This is illegal, and employers are not allowed to do it. This means that employer’s discriminatory actions are often not overt. It is more subtle, such as giving promotions to people of a certain gender or not promoting people who have a different sexual orientation.

Having policies that seem to govern all employees, but in fact, only really affect one gender is illegal discrimination. They may also have discriminatory dress codes that discriminate against one gender. And, employers may allow sexual harassment to occur to try and force employees to quit.

Since the actions are generally more subtle, it is important that employees document the discrimination and harassment. They need to make sure that they make complaints to their managers and human resources if they feel they are the victim of discrimination or harassment.

In addition, document the instances when they were harassed or discriminated against. Sometimes, employers will start giving poor performance reviews to give them legitimate reasons to take negative actions against employees who complain, so documenting when these actions took place is important.

While there have been steps taken over the years in California to try and stop gender discrimination and harassment, there are still many workers who are the victim of it. These employees may be entitled to compensation for this discrimination. It could be in the form of back pay if they were fired or other compensation they would have received, if they did not receive a promotion due to discrimination.

At Hennig Ruiz & Singh, we handle these cases and understand what employers do to try and hide it. For more information of how we handle these cases, please visit our gender discrimination and harassment page on our website.