Dive Brief:
- An Alabama-based security solutions firm will pay $1.6 million as part of a three-year consent decree to settle sex discrimination claims brought by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the agency announced Monday.
- According to an EEOC press release, Security Engineers, Inc., allegedly engaged in discrimination when it denied security officer jobs and assignments to women beginning in 2017. EEOC claimed that the company’s HR database directed staff not to schedule women for such jobs and designated certain jobs as “male only” despite female candidates’ past security, law enforcement or military experience.
- The alleged conduct violated Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, EEOC said. As part of the consent decree, Security Engineers must delete internal directives not to hire women as well as implement training, monitoring and reporting.
Dive Insight:
Employers violate federal equal employment opportunity laws when they publish job advertisements that show a preference for, or discourage the applications of, members of a particular race, religion, color, sex, age or national origin, according to EEOC guidance. The same is true of ads that discourage applications from people based on their disability status or genetic information.
“Title VII protects applicants and employees from discrimination based on sex in hiring and job assignments, and the EEOC is committed to enforcing and remedying unlawful sex discrimination,” Bradley Anderson, director of EEOC’s Birmingham, Alabama, district, said in the agency’s press release.
Last year, EEOC inked settlements in cases involving similar sex discrimination allegations. One involved claims that subsidiaries of waste management company GFL Environmental routinely refused to hire qualified women as truck drivers. In the second, staffing agency SmartTalent LLC agreed to pay $875,000 to settle claims that it declined to hire and place women in certain job assignments with clients.
But one aspect of EEOC’s anti-sex discrimination enforcement under Title VII has been curtailed since the inauguration of President Donald Trump: allegations of discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
The agency told staff to halt processing of gender identity- and sexual orientation-based discrimination claims in late January, HR Dive previously reported, and it has requested the dismissal of nearly all lawsuits it filed on behalf of transgender employees in 2024. As a result, advocacy groups have moved to intervene in some of those lawsuits, with one such group calling EEOC’s actions “deeply harmful” to the affected plaintiffs.