Plaintiff-appellant Madeline E. Brown, a letter carrier for the United States Postal Service (the “Postal Service”) 1 , was harassed by her co-workers in their Manhattan workplace. The question on appeal is whether this harassment occurred because of Brown’s sex, so as to bring it within the ambit of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e-1 et seq. The district court concluded that, as a matter of law, it did not. We agree, though on narrower grounds.
Background,
Brown claims that she was subjected to sex discrimination in employment by virtue оf a campaign of harassment that originated in a bitterly contested 1995 union election. In that election, plaintiffs chief antagonist was Thomas Nelson, who, with others, succeeded in ousting Brown from her post as union shop steward, a position she had held for eighteen years. The conflict between Brown and Nelson had begun just before the election when Brown criticized Nelson for repeatedly arriving hours late to work.
Plaintiff alleges that the “low and vicious ... campaign of rumors and slander” continued beyond the conclusion of the election. In particular, Nelson frequently mocked Brown for being “a slob,” for being overweight, and for certain modifications in her duties which resulted from an injury that she had suffered earlier. He accused her of spreading lies about him and “sa[ying] a lot of hostile stuff about the union which really wasn’t sexually harassing; very hostile and very angry.” Nelson also made fun of a purported romance, denied by Brown, between her and a mаrried co-worker, Timothy “Tiny” Par-rett. In this respect, Nelson and a group of co-workers habitually engaged in public speculation about the nature of Brown’s and Parrett’s relationship, teasing both of them for being lovers and for spending weekends together, and adding insulting references to the weight of both Parrett and Brown.
According to Brown, the bulk of the conduct focusing on her relationship with Parrett occurred in conversations, outside her presence, between the harassers and *250 Parrett. This was facilitated by the proximity of Parrett’s mail route to those of Nelson and the other antagonists. Even before the union election, Parrett himself had, for a long time, faced a pattern of workplace “needling” about his weight and “anything they can think of.”
In addition to Nelson, plaintiff identified several other co-workers as contributing to the harassment, primarily by joining in the speculation about her relationship with Parrett. She also complained that, becausе she was stationed next to co-workers who engaged in a steady stream of obscene conversation, she necessarily overhead their “vile” talk, though they never referred to her directly or attempted to pressure her into participating in their conversations. When she objected, however, they became abusive and mocked Brown’s weight and eating habits.
Besides this verbal harassment, Brown mentions two incidents in which she was graphically caricatured. In the first, a mаgazine picture of a naked, obese woman masturbating was posted near Parrett’s mail route and captioned “Tiny’s Girl.” After Brown removed the picture, another image was placed in the same spot, this one showing two elephants mating above the words “Tiny and Mary Lou.” 2 Within days of this event, Postal Service supervisors held a series of “service talks” on sexual harassment; these included specific instructions against the posting of any obscene pictures. Brown allegеs that her coworkers harassed her for instigating these service talks, and that her supervisors neither took her complaints seriously nor acted aggressively to suppress future harassment. Thus, although no more pictures were placed in the work area, about six months after the talks there was another incident involving a sexually explicit cartoon of Brown. In this one, a vulgar picture was drawn in a men’s bathroom, though not one regularly used by Parrett.
In her complaint to the Postаl Service’s Equal Employment Opportunity (“EEO”) office, which she filed after the “Tiny’s Girl” incident but before the bathroom graffiti, Brown made clear that her “first and foremost” complaint about her workplace was the verbal harassment by Nelson and his cohort. In the midst of a full account of “why Nelson and his friends hated me so much,” Brown also explained that management disliked her because of her conscientious advocacy as shop steward. And she went on to recount how her conflict with Nelson began with their clash over his working hours and evolved into the disputed union election. Significantly, nowhere in her detailed statement did she allege, either explicitly or implicitly, that any hostile actions were taken because of her sex. Again, in an affidavit supplementing her EEO complaint, plaintiff explained that “I am proud to say that I was a very good steward. I won a lot of grievances, helped a lot of people, and saved quite a few jobs. For this, more than anything else, Nelson and his friends envied and hated me and tried to make me less than human.” And in her deposition after this suit was filed, Brown once more emphasized that her dispute with Nelson was the sole cause of the hostility toward her:
I believe that the reason — the original reason for Mr. Nelson’s behavior and the harassment I was suffering had to do with my time as a shop steward.... And I believe that Mr. Nelson for various reasons if it hadn’t been for the election and all of that unpleasantness *251 аnd [if I hadn’t] told him that people were talking about him showing up three or four hours late this probably would not have happened. And I still believe that.
Only after defendant moved for summary judgment did plaintiff submit an affidavit alleging that the workplace abuse was “gender[ed] in nature and attacked me because I am a woman.” Up to that point, her explanation of what rendered the conduct at issue sexual harassment centered exclusively on the fact that some of it concernеd sexual acts, possessed sexual connotations, or related to the purported sexual relationship between her and Par-rett.
When the Postal Service found no merit in plaintiffs administrative complaint, Brown brought suit in district court, alleging both sex discrimination by virtue of a hostile work environment and retaliation for her complaints. Once discovery had been completed, defendant moved for summary judgment on a number of grounds, and the district court granted the motion.
The district cоurt’s reasons for granting summary judgment centered on deficiencies in plaintiffs proof that the harassment she experienced was “because of sex,” as is required for there to be Title VII liability.
See Brown v. Henderson,
Discussion
I. Summary Judgment Standard
We review
de novo
the district court’s grant of summary judgment.
Distasio v. Perkin Elmer Corp.,
*252
Nonetheless, an employment discrimination plaintiff faced with a properly supported summary judgment motion must “do more than simply show that there is some metaphysical doubt as to the material facts,”
Matsushita Elec. Indus. Co. v. Zenith Radio Corp.,
II. Title VII Standards for Proving Sex Discrimination
To show that she was subjected to sex discrimination by virtue of a hostile work environment, Brown must ultimately prove “conduct (1) that is ‘objectively’ severe or pervasive — that is, [conduct that] creates an environment that a reasonable рerson would find hostile or abusive [the ‘objective’ requirement], (2) that the plaintiff ‘subjectively perceive[s]’ as hostile or abusive [the ‘subjective’ requirement], and (3) that creates such an environment because of plaintiffs sex ... [the ‘prohibited causal factor’ requirement].”
Gregory v. Daly,
On appeal, the Postal Service primarily challenges plaintiffs proof of the third of the four requirements, and urges that the district court correctly ruled that there could be no discrimination “because of sex” where both a woman (Brown) and a man (Parrett) were harassed. This argument, while it does point to a relevant evidentia-ry consideration, cannot, however, end the necessarily individualized and fact-sensitive inquiry into why Brown was treated as shе was.
It is axiomatic that mistreatment at work, whether through subjection to a hostile environment or through such concrete deprivations as being fired or being denied a promotion, is actionable under Title VII only when it occurs because of an employee’s sex, or other protected characteristic.
See Oncale v. Sundowner Offshore Servs., Inc.,
As a result, discrimination against one employee cannot be cured, or disproven, solely by favorable, or equitable, treatment of other employees of the same race or sex.
See Teal,
457 U.S. at
*253
455,
Discrimination may, of course, also confer an illegal blanket advantage on members of one group over another — men for example over women. Indeed, the mechanisms by which discrimination occurs within the workplace are often such that they systematically do just that. For this reason, and to underscore such cases, courts have sometimes spoken of the “because of sex” requirement loosely in global terms. Thus, we ourselves have on occasion said that “an environment which is equally harsh for both men and women ... does not constitute a hostile working environment under the civil rights statutes.”
Brennan v. Metropolitan Opera Ass’n,
An example makes clear why this is so. Two workers share the same supervisor. A new supervisor takes over who despises women and Southerners. One of the two employees is a woman from New York; the other is a man from Georgia. The new supervisor fires both employees, explaining to the woman “I just don’t want any women working for me,” and telling the man “I just don’t want any Southerners working for me.” It is obvious that the woman was discriminated against because of her sex, and this fact is in no way negated merely because the supervisor also fired the male co-worker.
That being said, in the absence of evidence suggesting that a plaintiffs sex was relevant, the fact that both male and female employees are treated similarly, if badly, does give rise to the inference that their mistreatment shared a common cause that was unrelated to their sex.
Cf. Abdu-Brisson,
Nonetheless, the inquiry into whether ill treatment was actually sex-based discrimination cannot be shоrt-circuited by the mere fact that both men and women are involved. For it may be the case that a co-worker or supervisor treats both men and women badly, but women worse.
See Smith v. First Union Nat’l Bank,
III. Application to the Facts on Appeal
Accordingly, and turning to the case at hand, we do not find dispositive the fact that much of the challenged conduct had Parrett as its most immediate victim and audience. To the extent that co-workers’ conduct toward Parrett, or other men in the workplace, revealed their hostility toward Brown, or was part of a campaign to isolate her from workplacе allies,
on account of her sex,
such conduct could contribute to the creation of an actionably hostile work environment for plaintiff.
See Schwapp v. Town of Avon,
Nonetheless, we conclude that in the case before us Brown has not carried her burden of showing — even for purposes of avoiding summary judgment — that the harassment she faced was rooted in her sex. The bulk of the behavior she cites, though often highly cruel and vulgar, related either to her union-related conflict with Nelson or to her purported affair with Parrett. Most importantly, both in the statements she made in support of her EEO complaint and in her deposition, plaintiff repeatedly explained that Nelson and the othеrs were harassing her as an outgrowth of their dispute over the union election. And she never suggested that their antagonism toward her was related to her being a woman. 3 Instead, until her affidavit in opposition to summary judgment, Brown gave every indication that, in *256 her view, what made her tormentors’ conduct “sexual harassment” was the fact that the behavior touched on matters of sexuality, i.e. her purported sexual relationship with Parrett, and not that it was a form of sex discrimination.
The only basis fоr linking the harassers’ conduct to Brown’s sex is the fact that the bathroom cartoon and one of the pictures posted near Parrett’s mail route both relied for their effect upon a depiction of a naked female body. In some cases, this connection to plaintiffs sex has sufficed to support the inference that there was a sex-specific character to the course of conduct.
See Winsor v. Hinckley Dodge, Inc.,
Conclusion
We hold that, though there is no per se bar to maintaining a claim of sex discrimination where a person of another sex has been similarly treated, on the facts of this case plaintiff cannot show that she was discriminated against because of her sex. We therefore AFFIRM the judgment of the district court.
Notes
. Brown has sued William Henderson, the Postmaster General of the United States Postal Service (the "Postmaster General"), in his official capacity. For convenience, we will refer to both the Postmaster General and the Postal Service as the defendant-appellee in this case.
. According to Brown, who sometimes goes by "Matty,” her harassers often referred to her as "Matty Lou" or "Mary Lou.”
. Thus, this is not a case in which the union-related dispute was itself rooted in or exacerbated by Brown's gender. In fact, she had successfully been a shop steward for many years, seemingly without gender-related problems, and only was attacked after a dispute with Nelson that was unconnected to her sex. Similarly, there is no indication that the mockely of her relationship with Parrett was related to her being a woman.