University’s First Female Athletic Director Gets Job Bias Trial

A jury will have to decide whether Mississippi Valley State University’s justification for firing its first-ever female athletic director was a cover for sex or age bias, a federal judge ruled.

Evidence the explanation that Dianthia Ford-Kee was terminated because of the chronic overall underperformance of the school’s teams was pretextual includes the alleged failure of the university president to link that issue with her job performance previously, the US District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi said. That includes in a performance evaluation Ford-Kee received just three months before she was called into the president’s office and told ...