Air Force pays $140,000 to settle sex bias lawsuit
Huber lawyer says she feels vindicated after 10-year legal battle.
The United States Air Force paid Bridget E. Lyons $140,000 to settle a federal job discrimination lawsuit inwhich she alleged she wasn’t properly promoted at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, according to court documents obtained by this news organization.
Lyons was an attorney in the Air Force Materiel Command Law Office Acquisition Division. She worked full-time starting in 2000 on weapons systems contracts she said were worth billions of dollars.
“It was the upshot of 10 years of sex discrimination and reprisal against me by the management of the law office,” Lyons saidMonday. “So I feel quite vindicated for having received the settlement and gotten the long process over with.”
Lyons claimed gender discrimination, retaliation, and a hostile workenvironmentstemmingfrom her unsuccessful attempts forpromotion to leadership positions, according to court documents.
Her complaint said that during twoMay 2007 meetings, then-supervisor Peter Ditalia told Lyons hewould see her “finished in the office.” The complaint said the only witness to that statement was then-Col. Thomas Doyon, who said in a memo three years later that the statement “could have been made,” but thatDoyon blamed Lyons forwhat occurred.
In September 2009, Doyon deniedLyons apromotion, Lyons’ complaint alleges. She saidDoyon “pre-selected a man, accelerated his promotion, created after-thefact criteria, which he did not meet, and then provided varying reasons to Lyons for her non-selection.”
“Iwent up for promotionmultiple times, five or six times in a two-year time period, and got passed over every time for men,” Lyons said. “It was a glass ceiling kind of situation. Nowoman had