Kentucky hospital CEO didn’t promote woman because ‘men do better with men,’ lawsuit says

An administrator at a Kentucky hospital promoted a man over a woman even though she had more college degrees, saying the decision was based on his belief “that men do better with men,” a federal agency has charged in a discrimination lawsuit.

The complaint alleges the hospital also retaliated against the woman, Shannon Long, after she filed a complaint.

The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) filed the lawsuit against Ephraim McDowell Health, Inc., Wednesday in federal court in Lexington.

“Employers who use an employee’s gender as the basis for promotion decisions are clearly practicing unlawful discrimination,” Kenneth L. Bird, an EEOC attorney, said in a news release. “Such decisions must be based solely on the individual’s ability to do the job.”

Ephraim McDowell Health, based in Danville, operates the Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center there, along with Ephraim McDowell Fort Logan Hospital in Stanford, where Long worked, and the hospital in Harrodsburg.

The lawsuit alleges Ephraim McDowell Health engaged in illegal employment practices by denying Long a promotion because of her sex and then retaliating against her.

The hospital company fired Long in December 2022.

Long started working for Ephraim McDowell in 2001 as an obstetrics nurse, and from 2008 to October 2021 she was director of the obstetrics department at the Stanford hospital.

When the administrator at the Stanford hospital told employees in September 2021 she planned to retire, Long told the CEO of the company she was interested in the job, according to the lawsuit.

At the time, one qualification for the job was to have a master’s degree. Long had two master’s degrees and a doctorate in nursing, and had received the highest ratings possible on most categories in her evaluations for several years, according to the lawsuit.

But at a meeting the next month, the company’s CEO, who was not named in the lawsuit, “told Long he would not select her for the Administrator position because of her sex, based on his belief that men do better with men and that it was best to have a man in the Administrator position,” the lawsuit charges.

The company chose a man who did not have a master’s degree for the administrator job, according to the lawsuit.

The hospital company “lowered the existing education requirements” for the position so the man could meet them, the lawsuit says.

The company appointed Long as chief nursing officer, a lower-paid position that reported to the administrator.

After Long filed a complaint with the EEOC, the administrator refused to meet with her alone and the company excluded her from meetings, even though they dealt with issues under her responsibility.

The company said it fired her based on an investigation of its home health department, which was struggling, and a comment Long made during a discussion of a response to a hypothetical active shooter at the hospital.

The lawsuit did not say what Long said about the shooter.

The federal complaint alleges those reasons were just excuses, and that the investigation was biased because only three people who had complained about Long were interviewed, not any of the other employees Long had identified to provide more context.

The employees who complained didn’t understand Long had made changes at the direction of higher-ups in the company, the lawsuit says.

The lawsuit seeks an injunction barring Ephraim McDowell from failing to promote women because of their sex, from retaliating against people and requiring it to put polices in place to provide equal opportunity for women.

It also seeks an unspecified amount of money to compensate Long, as well as punitive damages for its “malicious and reckless conduct.”