An Albany County jury recently awarded $1.06 million to a longtime state Department of Labor employee after the panel concluded she had been passed over for three promotions due to her status as a mother with young children.
Will Waldron/Times Union
ALBANY — An Albany County jury recently awarded $1.06 million to a longtime state Department of Labor employee after the panel concluded that she had been passed over for three promotions due to her status as a mother with young children.
The jury’s 5-1 verdict following a trial in state Supreme Court included $275,000 for pain and suffering and $500,000 in lost benefits.
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Their verdict found that 45-year-old Stephanie Stashenko had been discriminated against by the agency and two supervisors, who had chosen a less experienced male employee for two of the promotions and a female employee who did not have children for the third promotion. That third promotion was awarded to a woman with less experience — but no children — over two female employees, including Stashenko, who had more experience but also were caring for young children.
The jury determined that the discrimination was based both on Stashenko’s gender and familial status.
According to the petition filed against the state and the two supervisors, after Stashenko was passed over for a second promotion in September 2021 she was assigned to review the work of the less-experienced and “childless” man who had received the promotion.
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Stashenko has been employed by the Department of Labor since 2004, when she took a job in the Unemployment Insurance Division as a review examiner. In 2008, she was promoted to a senior unemployment insurance reviewing examiner in the division’s fraud unit — a promotion that came after she had been training new review examiners for at least six months.
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Through the years, according to court records, Stashenko received only “satisfactory” employee reviews and took on expanded duties that included training new staff, supervising examiners and trainees, reviewing their work for accuracy, handling high-priority cases, and creating staff development and training presentations.
The two supervisors accused of declining to promote Stashenko were Tom Neumann, a former assistant director in the department who has since been promoted to a director’s position, and Claudia Carusone, a former supervising review examiner who has retired from the agency.
In 2021 and 2022, Stashenko had applied for and was denied promotions to an associate examiner position “based on her sex and familial status,” according to the civil complaint. The male employee who was first appointed to that position on a provisional basis had about three years of experience as a supervising examiner compared with Stashenko’s 13 years in the position, according to court records.
After Stashenko was denied a third promotion in March 2022, she was allegedly “told by other … employees that defendant Neumann does not like to promote parents, particularly mothers with young children, that he does not want someone in the (associate reviewer) position to have any outside responsibilities, that the (Unemployment Insurance Division) office is unfriendly to mothers, and that it was expected that the only childless applicant would receive the promotion,” according to the lawsuit, which was filed in state Supreme Court in April 2022.
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Christine Buttigieg, a spokeswoman for the Department of Labor, said the agency “does not comment on personnel matters.” (The agency’s officials are not prohibited from commenting on the allegations in the lawsuit or the jury’s verdict.)
Kevin A. Luibrand, Stashenko’s attorney, said that “women in the workplace with young children have the same rights as anyone else to promotions.”
“They cannot be dismissively told that their lives are too stressed as a reason to block career advancement,” Luibrand added. “The irony is the (state) Department of Labor, which regulates everyone else’s workplace, did not have its own house in order.”
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The jury also concluded that the state agency shared blame for approving the decisions by Neumann and Carusone “to not promote Stashenko based on her sex and familial status.”