On Wednesday, I posted about a recent District Court decision that held that "Paid Administrative Leave" is not an "adverse employment action.".  Without such an action, an employee typically cannot raise a claim of discrimination under the legal framework for analyzing such claims.

The same district court judge, The Honorable Mark Kravitz, released a decision a few days later also tackling that the subject of what whether a company’s failure to fill a posted position with any employee can give rise to a discrimination claim.  Ultimately, the court concluded that it was not.

The case, Roncallo v. Sikorsky Aircraft Corp. (download here) is not your typical Title VII case. Indeed, the plaintiff is a white male who claims, in part, that the company chose not to fill a posted position (which would have given him a promotion) because there were not enough diverse candidates that either applied or were qualified.

Ultimately, the court concluded that:

Although the fact that the company decided to close the position following [a manager’s] recommendation of four white male candidates may be sufficient to give rise to "speculation and conjecture," it is not sufficient to defeat Sikorsky’s lawful explanation for its action or to support an ultimate inference of unlawful discrimination.

Indeed, while the court’s final decision rested on this ground, it pointed out other issues with the Plaintiff’s case too. For example, of the twenty similar-level positions posted in the plaintiff’s division in 2008, seven were also left unfilled and twelve were filled with white males.  Those statistics, obviously, hardly show a bias against white males.