A jury has awarded an Iowa Department of Human Services employee $790,000 in damages in her lawsuit accusing the department of fostering sexual harassment.
The jury handed down the award at the conclusion of the nearly two-week-long trial in a lawsuit brought in 2019 by Tracy White, the Des Moines Register reported.
White started working at the department in 2000 and has been a social work administrator and senior manager since 2008. She said in her lawsuit that she had suffered from anxiety, depression and physical ailments brought on by a workplace rife with sexual references and lewd, inappropriate behavior. That included including explicit comments from a male boss and IT worker about her and other employees, discrimination against female and LGBTQ workers, and hiring and promotion decisions based on attractiveness, she said.
Iowa Assistant Attorney General Kayla Burkhiser Reynolds, who represented the department, argued that state officials made an effort to respond to White’s complaints and that White had made too much of the comments.
“They’re spaced out,” Burkhiser Reynolds said. “It wasn’t as though Tracy was going to work and having things happen every single day where people make pervasive sexual comments, sex jokes in the office.”
Many of the complaints in White’s lawsuit centered on the behavior of her former boss, who was fired in 2019 after White complained directly to Gov. Kim Reynolds. Another DHS supervisor accused of grabbing an employee’s breast and making jokes about interracial sex was also fired in a separate investigation.
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