Mehta v. DLA Piper: When a Female Supervisor and a Female Jury Aren't Enough
Yesterday, a Manhattan federal jury returned a defense verdict in Mehta v. DLA Piper, a pregnancy discrimination case brought by a former associate who alleged she was fired shortly after disclosing her pregnancy. The jury of seven women and one man deliberated for just over four hours before finding in the firm’s favor.
Two things about this outcome stand out. First, the firm leaned heavily on the fact that the supervising partner who made the termination decision had herself taken maternity leave twice and was promoted to partner while pregnant. The implied argument is a woman who personally benefited from parental leave policies simply couldn’t have discriminated against a pregnant subordinate. Second, some will point to the jury’s composition of seven women as validation of that logic.
But neither of those facts is the exoneration it’s being made out to be.
Research has long documented what’s known as “Queen Bee Syndrome,” a phenomenon in which women who have achieved success in male-dominated workplaces distance themselves from junior women rather than advocate for them. This behavior is not a source of gender inequality but a consequence of it. A response to the discrimination women experience in organizations where men hold most positions of power. The structural conditions that produce it are well-documented: chronic underrepresentation of women in leadership, promotion systems that reward masculine traits, and pressure to assimilate into masculine workplace cultures in order to survive.
Women who have experienced more gender discrimination in their careers are actually more likely to exhibit queen bee responses, and this pattern is especially pronounced in male-dominated law firms. A senior woman’s personal experience with parental leave doesn't foreclose the possibility that she applied a different standard to someone beneath her. If anything, her own prior experience with discrimination may have shaped, rather than softened, that judgment.
The same logic applies to the jury box. Shared gender is not the same as shared perspective. The research further tells us that negative evaluations of junior women by senior women are more damaging and less likely to be recognized as discriminatory than the same evaluations coming from men — a dynamic that could carry over into how a jury assesses a female supervisor’s credibility. It bears emphasis that discrimination by someone who shares the plaintiff’s gender, race, sexual orientation, or other protected characteristic is no less actionable under the law. A juror who has internalized an “I earned it the hard way” ethos, or who has navigated her own workplace adversity without naming it as discrimination, may be less sympathetic to a discrimination plaintiff, not more. This is precisely why jury selection in employment discrimination cases is so critical.
None of this means the verdict in Mehta was wrong. Juries weigh credibility, and they found DLA Piper’s witnesses more credible. But the narrative that a female supervisor’s own family leave history clears her, or that a female-majority jury’s verdict carries special legitimacy on a pregnancy discrimination claim, deserves scrutiny. Discrimination doesn’t announce itself, and the people most likely to miss it aren’t always who you’d expect.