Haywood v. Lucent Technologies, Inc.
| Decision Date | 20 March 2003 |
| Docket Number | No. 01-4092.,01-4092. |
| Citation | 323 F.3d 524 |
| Parties | Cherry HAYWOOD, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. LUCENT TECHNOLOGIES, INCORPORATED, Defendant-Appellee. |
| Court | U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit |
James W. Holman (argued), Naperville, IL, for Plaintiff-Appellant.
Charles C. Jackson, Ian Hugh Morrison (argued), Seyfarth Shaw, Chicago, IL, for Defendant-Appellee.
Before POSNER, EASTERBROOK, and DIANE P. WOOD, Circuit Judges.
Cherry Haywood, an African American woman who worked for some time at Lucent Technologies as an engineer, had consistently unfavorable performance reviews. After a tense encounter with a supervisor, Lucent fired her. Convinced that it had done so for racially discriminatory reasons and in retaliation for an earlier complaint, Haywood sued Lucent under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, et seq. To these federal claims, she added a supplemental state law claim for defamation. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Lucent on all counts. We affirm.
Haywood began working for Lucent in 1996. In December 1997, after various assignments, she transferred to the company's Switching and Access Systems (SAS) organization. In July 1998, Haywood received her mid-year performance review, which was generally unfavorable. Haywood, who felt that the problem was really management and not her performance, responded by filing an internal complaint of race discrimination with Lucent's Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action (EO/AA) organization. Yolanda Escalante, an employee of the EO/AA organization, investigated Haywood's complaint and found no evidence of race discrimination. Nevertheless, Escalante suggested that management had not adequately defined Haywood's objectives, nor had it sufficiently documented its concerns about Haywood's performance. At her recommendation, management gave Haywood a satisfactory year-end performance rating for 1998 and agreed to help Haywood transfer to another department.
Thereafter, Haywood contacted Spencer Foote, an African-American senior manager in Lucent's Wireless organization, hoping to pursue opportunities in his organization. When Foote interviewed Haywood in December 1998, she told him about her earlier EO/AA complaint. Foote continued the hiring process, and in January 1999 he offered her a position as a project engineer. Haywood accepted. Once again, however, in May 1999, she received a generally unfavorable performance review, this time from Darlene Scott, her manager in the Wireless group. Scott appraised Haywood's performance based on a list of 19 job objectives Haywood had received at the beginning of the year. Although the evaluation attempted to be kind, praising Haywood for her contributions to Lucent's recruiting efforts, it was generally critical. Scott's evaluation reported a number of problems, including that Haywood (1) did not take personal responsibility for results and usually deflected failure toward others; (2) did not assume accountability and responsibility; (3) received feedback on her behaviors and interaction with team members in a way that caused concern; (4) was not "proactive" in providing information on her project; (5) inconsistently met obligations, sometimes missing deadlines; and (6) did not regularly submit time reports. Scott also prepared a detailed, five-page, single-spaced memorandum listing specific examples of these problems. In a meeting with Scott, Foote, and the department's human resource manager, Melinda Jackson Douglas, Haywood was not receptive to management's feedback. Instead, she attacked Scott's evaluation of her performance, calling it subjective and defamatory. Haywood promised to prepare a rebuttal to Scott's evaluation, but she never provided any such document to her managers.
Around the beginning of July 1999, for reasons unrelated to this litigation, Lucent decided to disband Scott's group and allow project engineers to find work in other groups within Foote's organization. After some controversy over an alleged delay, Haywood was transferred to Robert Shuman's group in early August.
In November 1999, the pattern of unfavorable reviews continued. Shuman prepared Haywood's end-of-year performance review based on his own assessment of her work and feedback from Haywood's prior managers and peers that year. His evaluation was negative: on a scale of one to six (with six indicating the likelihood of termination), Shuman gave Haywood a rating of "five." A "five" meant that Haywood would not be terminated, but placed on a performance improvement plan. Haywood thought that Shuman's assessment was wrong.
In the end, however, another incident intervened that led to Haywood's termination. On December 2, 1999, she was called to Shuman's office to discuss the status of one of her projects. Although the facts surrounding this incident are in dispute, and we would normally accept the facts most favorable to Haywood, in this instance it is important to recount both versions, because both versions reached the ultimate decisionmaker—Foote. According to Haywood, Shuman told Haywood that he felt she did not put in the aggressive work he expected. When Haywood responded that she did not understand, Shuman became agitated and said, "Cherry, I think you don't understand how much stress and pressure I am under here." Haywood responded, "Well, Bob, you know, I really feel sorry for a person who allows their moral values and ethics to be compromised if that is how you feel." Shuman ordered Haywood to "get the hell out of his office" and told Haywood he never wanted to see her again without a third person present. Shuman then rose from his chair, came over to where Haywood was standing, took her by the elbow, and pushed her out of the doorway.
Shuman's account is quite different. He recalled that Haywood was upset that he had questioned her progress on a project. She attacked him personally, telling him that he was a bad supervisor, that she did not respect him, and that he thought he was God. After this outburst, Shuman ended the discussion and told Haywood that he wanted to have a third party present at any further discussions because of his concern that Haywood would misrepresent him. He asked Haywood to leave the office, at which point she "stood her ground and proceeded to stick her finger in [his] face, escalating her tone." Shuman raised his voice, stood up, opened the door, and asked her to leave.
Both Shuman and Haywood e-mailed Foote, documenting their versions of the incident. In Haywood's e-mail, Haywood acknowledged that she had raised her voice in response to Shuman's statements "attacking [her] credibility." Foote apparently chose to believe Shuman's version of the facts. After meeting with legal counsel, he terminated Haywood on December 7, 1999, for (1) her inability to accept and act upon constructive feedback; (2) her inability to "establish a viable working relationship with management"; and (3) her "pattern of insubordinate behavior."
On January 10, 2000, Haywood filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), which issued Haywood a right-to-sue letter. This lawsuit followed on July 21, 2000.
We review the district court's grant of summary judgment de novo, examining the facts in a light most favorable to Haywood as the nonmoving party, and drawing all reasonable inferences in her favor. Greer v. Board of Educ. of City of Chicago, 267 F.3d 723, 726 (7th Cir.2001). Summary judgment is appropriate only "if the pleadings, depositions, answers to interrogatories, and admissions on file, together with affidavits, if any, show that there is no genuine issue as to any material fact and that the moving party is entitled to a judgment as a matter of law." FED. R.CIV. P. 56(c); Celotex Corp. v. Catrett, 477 U.S. 317, 322, 106 S.Ct. 2548, 91 L.Ed.2d 265 (1986).
A claim of race discrimination may be established in one of two ways—under the direct method or the indirect burden-shifting method set forth in McDonnell Douglas v. Green, 411 U.S. 792, 93 S.Ct. 1817, 36 L.Ed.2d 668 (1973). See Wallace v. SMC Pneumatics, Inc., 103 F.3d 1394, 1397 (7th Cir.1997). Under the direct method, the plaintiff may show either through direct or circumstantial evidence that the employer's decision to take the adverse job action was motivated by an impermissible purpose, such as her race or national origin. See id.; Troupe v. May Dep't Stores Co., 20 F.3d 734, 736 (7th Cir.1994).
Relying on Troupe, Haywood argues that there is direct evidence of discriminatory intent, which she claims can be proved by circumstantial evidence. She points first to various comments that Foote allegedly made to herself and others at Lucent in the summer of 1999—namely that Foote said he was tired of helping or putting his neck out for African-American women because all they did was complain. Haywood also claims that Foote had told one African-American co-worker to be careful about the company she kept: "As a black woman it's already more difficult of a challenge to help you, but if you are keeping bad company that will certainly not help you." Second, she claims that Lucent treated her less favorably than it did two white male employees who also received performance ratings of five on their year-end review. Lucent put the two white male employees on performance improvement plans; only Haywood was terminated.
Lucent begins by arguing that there should be a presumption of non-discrimination because Foote, who discharged Haywood, is also African-American. It is wrong; no such presumption exists, nor should one be created. To the contrary, the Supreme Court has explicitly rejected exactly this idea: "Because of the many facets of human motivation, it would be unwise to presume as a matter of law that human beings of one definable...
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