NEW YORK—A telecommunications field worker's treatment, which included being forced to work in unsafe areas alone, was sufficiently severe to affect her working conditions, a federal appeals court panel ruled in saying a jury should consider her hostile work environment claim.

According to the Aug. 13 decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York in Joan Pucino vs. Verizon Communications Inc., Ms. Pucino worked in Newburgh, N.Y., as a field technician installing and repairing telecommunications cable for Basking Ridge, N.J.-based Verizon from 1991 until her retirement in 2002.

Ms. Pucino said her problems included being ordered to work alone in parts of Newburgh considered unsafe, which her male colleagues were not required to do; being denied access to tools that male co-workers were permitted to use; and being denied access to “bucket trucks,” which were safer than the vans with large ladders that she had to use.

In addition, said Ms. Pucino, she was reprimanded for being “off the job” when she used public restroom facilities rather than those where she worked, which were “unisex, generally dirty and also lacked doors or other security to prevent men from walking in,” according to court papers. Male co-workers openly used public restrooms, which was “unremarked upon,” the court said.

She was also subjected to verbal abuse by her supervisors, including being called a “bitch” and “stupid” and “repeatedly singled out for intense and often public criticism,” unlike male co-workers.

In overturning a lower court ruling dismissing the case, the three-judge appeals court panel held that “the combination of disparate treatment and gender-based verbal abuse” can support the inference “that the other complained-of instances of abuse involving the two foremen were in fact gender-based.”

“A rational juror could find the treatment of Pucino to be sufficiently severe or sufficiently pervasive to alter the conditions of her employment,” the court ruled in remanding the case for further proceedings.