A federal judge in Birmingham, Alabama has denied Medtronic’s attempt to throw out a sex discrimination lawsuit filed by a male former employee.
The employee, Joshua Boyd, began working at Medtronic (NYSE:MDT) in 2013. Boyd claims that despite earning the title of “top seller” of surgical equipment for Medtronic’s Midwest region, a new female manager transferred him to a new sales area, where he struggled to achieve his previous sales figures. Boyd claims the alleged discrimination stemmed from Medtronic’s Aspire program, announced by CEO Omar Ishrak in 2014 to make women 50% of management.
William K. says
It may have been age discrimination instead of sex discrimination. Several years ago a friend of mine suffered a similar transfer because his sales commissions were quite large, being based on his large set of established customers, which was because of his great sales abilities. He did initiate a lawsuit and did win a large judgement. Unfortunately he died just a month later, from a “heart attack”, which I consider to have been under rather mysterious conditions. The company was a quite large and diversified medical and chemical supplier and certainly had the resources to produce such a demise with no obvious clues.
So perhaps Mister Boyd should re-file his suit based on a more clearly visible basis.