Preston v. Wisconsin Health Fund

• Decision Date: 09 February 2005
• Docket Number: No. 04-2384.,04-2384.
• Citation: 397 F.3d 539
• Parties: Jay PRESTON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v. WISCONSIN HEALTH FUND, Bruce Trojak, and Linda Hamilton, Defendants-Appellees.
• Court: U.S. Court of Appeals — Seventh Circuit

397 F.3d 539

Jay PRESTON, Plaintiff-Appellant, v.WISCONSIN HEALTH FUND, Bruce Trojak, and Linda Hamilton, Defendants-Appellees.

No. 04-2384.

United States Court of Appeals, Seventh Circuit.

Argued January 11, 2005.

Decided February 9, 2005.

Rebecca L. Salawdeh, Urban, Taylor & Stawski, Milwaukee, WI, Charles F. Stierman(argued), Stierman, Steffens & Kuphall, Waukesha, WI, for Plaintiff-Appellant.

Naomi E. Soldon(argued), Previant, Goldberg, Uelmen, Gratz, Miller & Brueggeman, Milwaukee, WI, for Defendants-Appellees.

Before POSNER, MANION, and ROVNER, Circuit Judges.

POSNER, Circuit Judge.

Jay Preston, a dentist, charges that the Wisconsin Health Fund, his former employer, discriminated against him on account of his sex in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,42 U.S.C. §§ 2000e et seq., when they replaced him as director of the Fund's dental clinic with Linda Hamilton(not to be confused with the female lead in the first two Terminator movies).Preston further argues that in procuring this substitution, Bruce Trojak, the Fund's chief executive officer conspired with Hamilton to destroy Preston's contractual relationship with the Fund, in violation of Wisconsin's common law of tortious interference with contract.The district court granted summary judgment for the defendants.

The Fund is a teamsters health and welfare fund that provides health services directly in clinics that it owns, as well as indirectly by paying for medical or dental treatment that its participants obtain outside the Fund's clinics.The Fund had been hemorrhaging money for many years when Trojak became its chief executive officer in 1998.The dental clinic alone, under Preston, its long-time director, lost $1 million the following year.Preston presented ideas for stemming the flow to Trojak in a well-written business plan (Preston has an M.B.A. as well as a dental degree), despite which Trojak fired him and replaced him with Hamilton, a much younger dentist who had no apparent credentials for the job except eagerness for it.Trojak testified at his deposition that Preston's ideas were too few and too late and that he was impressed by Hamilton's "can do" attitude.This may be true but it may also be true, as Preston claims, that Trojak favored Hamilton for personal reasons.There were rumors, although unsubstantiated, that they were having an affair.They frequently dined together and sometimes after dinner would repair to his apartment for — according to their not terribly credible deposition testimony — platonic sessions solely devoted to disinterested discussion of the future of the dental clinic, though Hamilton did acknowledge indicating at these sessions her desire to be promoted to dental director.

Trojak is no longer with the Fund, and Hamilton is no longer the dental director.But the circumstances of their departures are obscure, and both are represented in this lawsuit by the Fund's law firm.

A male executive's romantically motivated favoritism toward a female subordinate is not sex discrimination even when it disadvantages a male competitor of the woman.Such favoritism is not based on a belief that women are better workers, or otherwise deserve to be treated better, than men; indeed, it is entirely consistent with the opposite opinion.The effect on the composition of the workplace is likely to be nil, especially since the disadvantaged competitor is as likely to be another woman as a man — were Preston a woman, Trojak would still have fired her to make way for Hamilton unless Trojak was romantically entangled with both of them.Neither in purpose nor in consequence can favoritism resulting from a personal relationship be equated to sex discrimination.Schobert v. Illinois Dept. of Transportation,304 F.3d 725, 733(7th Cir.2002);Womack v. Runyon,147 F.3d 1298(11th Cir.1998)(per curiam);Becerra v. Dalton,94 F.3d 145, 149-50(4th Cir.1996);DeCintio v. Westchester County Medical Center,807 F.2d 304, 308(2d Cir.1986).

Preston tries to bolster his case by pointing to the fact that Trojak gave large raises to several women and by noting that there was even talk in the workplace of "Bruce and his harem."But he provides no details that would enable a trier of fact to infer that the raises were motivated by the recipients' sex.All we know is the amount of the raises, the number of recipients, and the sex ratio of the recipients — five women to two men.To infer discrimination we would need to know more.We would need to know the sex composition of the Fund's workforce, whether there were men who had jobs comparable to those of the five women but didn't get similar raises, and whether the raises were due to the women's being promoted to new jobs and if so whether men had a fair opportunity to compete for those promotions.There are some answers in the record but Preston makes nothing of them.He insists that the bare fact that more women than men got large raises, together with the favoritism shown Linda Hamilton, is enough to get him to a jury.

One reason it is not enough is that the courts take a realistic view of the circumstances in which an inference that men are discriminating in favor of rather than against women is plausible.Phelan v. City of Chicago,347 F.3d 679, 684-85(7th Cir.2003);Mills v. Health Care Service Corp.,171 F.3d 450, 455-57(7th Cir.1999);Leadbetter v. Gilley,385 F.3d 683, 690(6th Cir.2004).It is not surprising when women discriminate in favor of women any more than it is surprising when men discriminate in favor of men.It is surprising, in many though not all cases, when men discriminate against men in favor of women.Two situations have been identified in the cases where it is not surprising.The first is where the men running the company are under pressure from affirmative action plans, customers, public opinion, the EEOC, a judicial decree, or corporate superiors imbued with belief in "diversity" to increase the proportion of women in the company's workforce.Hill v. Ross,183 F.3d 586(7th Cir.1999);Wheeler v. Missouri Highway & Transportation Comm'n,348 F.3d 744, 749(8th Cir.2003);Brunet v. City of Columbus,1 F.3d 390(6th Cir.1993).The second situation is where the jobs in question are traditional "women's work," such as nursing, which the men running the company believe women can do better than men; fixated on this stereotype they refuse to make an individualized assessment of male applicants.Lynn v. Deaconess Medical Center-West Campus,160 F.3d 484(8th Cir.1998);Diaz v. Pan American World Airways, Inc.,442 F.2d 385(5th Cir.1971);cf.Mississippi University for Women v. Hogan,458 U.S. 718, 720-21, 102 S.Ct. 3331, 73 L.Ed.2d 1090(1982).

There may be other situations as well in which it is plausible to expect that men might discriminate against men and in favor of women; the list is not a closed one.SeePhelan v. City of Chicago, supra,347 F.3d at 684-85;Mills v. Health Care Service Corp., supra,171 F.3d at 456-57.But when as in this case no reason is given why men might be expected to discriminate against men, the plaintiff, to raise a triable issue of discrimination, must present some evidence beyond the bare fact that a woman got a job that a man wanted to get or keep.A gross disparity in qualifications might be such evidence — but for the fact in this case that the plaintiff himself is insisting that the reason the less-qualified Hamilton was given the job of the more-qualified Preston was personal and, as we have explained, unrelated to sex discrimination.All that is left is the undeveloped evidence of the raises given to the other women.The district judge was correct, therefore, to grant summary judgment for the Fund on Preston's Title VII claim.

Let us move on to the tort claim.Preston's lawyer suggested at argument that by joining it to a Title VII claimhe had the defendants in a fork.If we thought that Trojak advanced Hamilton for purely romantic reasons, this would, he conceded, undermine his Title VII claim for the reason that we have just explained.But he insisted that it would make his tortious-interference case by showing that Trojak and Hamilton had ruptured Preston's contractual relationship with the Fund without justification.

In the typical tortious-interference case, A has a contract with B — for example, to sing in an opera produced by B — and C comes along...